Final Project Work Session

Component 1: Project Pitch and Team Charter (Due Friday)

Form a group of 3-5 and choose or invent a project (drawing on the brainstorming document). Collectively write a blog post the lays out your project pitch and group charter.

Project Pitch

• Members of the group
• The project topic and objectives for what you plan to produce
• The proposed methodology:
  • Sources: What data do you hope to use and how do you hope to find it?
  • Processes: What tools and techniques will you use to gather sources and store your data?
    • What analyses or transformations will you conduct on those data?
  • Presentation: How will you present the results and integrate the digital assets you create as an interactive final product?
• A link to one or more DH projects that you think might make a good model for what you plan to do.
• Create a unique tag for your group to tag all your posts going forward.

Group Charter

Good collaboration doesn’t just happen! It takes open and sometimes difficult communication. One way to take the trouble out of group work is to lay out issues using a “project charter” (see examples from the Praxis Program at Scholars’ Lab). Determine the following about your group:

• What are your shared values? Shared goals?  Expectations for each other?
• How will you communicate and handle disagreements?
• Assign group role. Who will be responsible for calling meetings or posting to WordPress? Cleaning data? Creating Visualizations? Setting up and editing the project website?
  • Consider each of your strengths and weaknesses, as well as schedules in terms of workflow.

Specs:

• Post to WordPress by Friday Week 8
• Tag with your final project
• Submit link on Moodle
• No word count, but address all the above questions for both Pitch and Charter

Component 2: Project Update and Source Documentation (due Sunday)

The thing that makes archival materials so captivating is also what makes them challenging to work with in a computational way. Most of you will not be working with perfect data sets. They will require cleaning – or tidying – to get them in a state that can be used by digital tools. Sometimes you need to add data (like coordinates) or remove data (like personal information).

This project component asks you to collectively write a blog post on the course blog that fully documents the sources you’ll be using.

I recommend writing this out on a shared Google Doc and appointing one person to post by Sunday.

Specs: 

• Post to WordPress and submit the link on Moodle.
• Tag with your final project consistent tag
• No word count, but the longer the better. 
• A list of the sources you plan to use with full citations and links. Each source should include a brief annotation (bullets are fine) that addresses the following:
  • Format – what format is this source in? What format does it need to be in? What do you need to do to get it there?
  • Rights – who owns this material? What are you allowed to use? How do you know?
  • Privacy/ethics – Who is depicted in this data? How? Is there sensitive information that needs to be removed? Any other ethical considerations?

• A brief update on the progress of your project:
  • What have you done so far, what have you gathered, and what have you built?
  • What applications/languages/frameworks have you selected and how are you going to implement them?
  • What issues have you run into? Have they forced you to change your initial plan?
• A brief statement from each group member on their contribution thus far to the project