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Analyzing DH Projects

Today we are going to dive into what Burdick et al. call “The Basic Unit” of Digital Humanities, the project. We will examine the various component parts and learn how to analyze them effectively.

One of the most common reactions to seeing finished DH projects is “That’s really awesome but I could never do something like that,” or “I wouldn’t know how to even start making something like that!”

Miriam Posner’s fantastic post “How Did They Make That?” and accompanying video offers two very useful frames for figuring out what digital projects are doing and how they were made:

  1. A DH Project Field Guide that gives a taxonomy of the standard types of projects out there, including
    • Exhibit
    • Digital Edition
    • Map
    • Timeline
    • Data Visualization
    • Text Analysis
    • 3D Imaging
    • Multimedia Narrative
  2. A tripartite anatomy of DH Projects that breaks them down into their three component parts
    • Sources (raw research materials)
    • Processed (analysis, digitization, remediation of those sources)
    • Presented (publication on the web)
Johanna Drucker/Miriam Posner’s basic anatomy of DH projects

In Class

With a partner, pick one of the following projects:

Explore the project and try to find the following pieces of information:

  • What is the goal of the project?
  • Which academic fields (i.e history) do you see the project in conversation with?
  • Does the site make an argument? If so, what?
  • What are the components? (i.e essay, interactive map, etc)
  • Which methods are used?
  • Who is the target audience? (i.e. specialists? a broader public?)
  • What kinds of data is being used? Is the data available for broader use? Would you want it to be?
  • Is the project open source/ open access?
  • Who made the website? What are their relationships to the institution?

With credit to Lauren Tilton’s Intro DH course for this list of questions

Assignment

Your task for next time is to dig deeper into the nature of DH projects and write a detailed response to one of them as a blog post.

Having watched and discussed Miriam Posner’s video on the components of a DH project, explore one of the sites below and write a post trying to reverse engineer one of these DH projects.

Make sure your post does the following:

  • Introduces and links to the project you explored.
  • Contains at least one image of the project that links directly to it
    • If you don’t know how, follow these instructions to take a screenshot on a Mac/on a PC.).
  • Breaks down the black box of your digital project by indentifying its
    • Sources (assets)
    • Processes (services)
    • Presentation (display)
  • Answers at least three of the questions above

You may need to poke around the About or FAQ sections of the page to figure out this information, but see how far you can get.

As you write, remember that blog writing is a different beast that lies somewhere between formal academic writing and casual social media or email style.  Try for a tone that is scholarly and informed but neither too stiff nor too sloppy.  It can be a tough balance to strike, but think of your intended audience and try to find a voice that works for you.


Resources

Carleton College’s own web services group has a lot of good resources for how to write for the web effectively.

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