Final Project

Your final project for this course can be completed in a number of formats. I’ve outlined four potential options below. Choose one or see me if what you have in mind doesn’t quite fit into these boxes. We’ve covered a lot of ground this semester: many disciplines, debates, tools, and techniques. There are probably countless ways to combine these influences into a final statement on what you’ve learned in the course. So, if you’d like to pursue something along different lines, let’s talk about it.

Dean’s Date — preferred project submission — Tue, May 7

Grades Due — I submit yr final grade — Mon, May 20

Opt. 1: Seminar Paper

Write a seminar paper of ~4,000 – 6,000 words on a topic we’ve addressed in our course readings, conversations, or workshops. Your paper should include a Works Cited page, should demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of current critical conversations on your topic, and should suggest your own contribution to that ongoing dialogue.

I’ve included some potential starting points below and am also open to your suggestions for papers on entirely different topics.

Potential Topics:

• What is method in the humanities? Why is quantification so often excluded from definitions of the humanities, despite the use of quantitative methods in humanistic scholarship stretching back for centuries? Finally, in what ways do humanistic methods converge and diverge with those in data science and natural language processing? How differently, for example, would a humanist and data scientist think of “meaning” or “prediction”? What are the benefits of bridging those differences?
• What is at stake in the various definitions of digital humanities (as a field, discipline, or cluster of methods) that we have explored this semester? How do these definition shift, and why, when we consider different disciplinary contexts (history, literature, classics, &c.)?
• How should we grapple with the problematic origins of technologies now regularly used in DH? As DH scholars have shown us, statistical regression was a concept devised in the context of eugenics, some of the first IBM punch cards were used to manage mass murder, and topic modeling was developed by DARPA. Do these artifacts have politics or are they neutral tools? Can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house? These papers should explore the technical details of one (or more) of these technologies and provide a sense of how those methods are being applied in contemporary DH scholarship.

Opt. 2: Speculative Data Curation

Begin creating a humanities dataset that you frame with a curatorial statement describing its contents and research potential. You will not finish this data. Data curation is a long and painstaking process. The goal of this project option is to outline your data’s fields and the exciting questions it might allow you and other researchers to explore.

Your data types might be:

• bibliographic: books, publication dates, and authors
• demographic: name, job title, age, location, date
• semantic: a keyword and its collocates
• numerical: chord, measure, beat, time signature, figured bass
• geographic: GIS coordinates, historical place names

The length of your curatorial statement should be inversely proportional to the amount of data work you’ve done. That is, if you devoted the majority of your time to working on the data and have filled in fields for a fair number of records, your statement can be shorter. On the other hand, if you have yet to do much data entry, your data work can consist of a data dictionary while the curatorial statement should be longer.

In your curatorial statement, you should address:

• What will be involved in cleaning this data? What problems do you anticipate encountering, and how might new insight be gleaned during this cleaning and normalization process?
• Imagine that you will write an essay that draws on your completed dataset. Now, write a sample paragraph from this essay that references your data in order to make an argument. How will your dataset affect the elements of your research, from the sentence level of your writing style all the way up to the broader epistemological stakes of your argument?
• List a few research questions that future scholars might want to explore using your dataset. What will have to happen to your data in order to make those research explorations possible?
• Have similar datasets been compiled? Is there an opportunity to link your datasets with those others?
• What unique identifiers will be used?

Opt. 3: Speculative Project Proposal

Write a short prospectus for a DH research project related to your home discipline in the form of a mock grant proposal. Ideally, the project will use tools and techniques we’ve covered throughout the term: digital maps, data visualization, 3D scanning, topic modeling, &c.

The proposal should include elements like a bibliography, a speculative sample of what your finished project will look like (a visualization? a web interface? a map?), the teaching potential of the project, the collaborators you will need to recruit, and the kinds of research questions it would enable.

The proposed project should not be fully enacted during the course, but can eventually take the form of a conference talk, dissertation chapter, article, or dataset.

For inspiration, view the NEH Office of Digital Humanities sample application narratives.

Opt. 4: A Group Collaboration

In groups of 2 or 3, you can produce a collaborative final project. Possible collaborations include:

• Construct a glossary of technical terms from computer science and the humanities, legible to participants from both disciplines. This glossary should be a living resource to which future students can read and write. Humanistic concepts like “idiographic” and “paleography” should receive equal depth as technical concepts like “dimensionality reduction” and “semantic distribution.”

Along with the group project (whatever form it takes), each student should individually submit a brief (>1,000 word) statement outlining their own contributions, and reflecting on the ways this project might have life beyond the course.