Final Projects

For your final projects, devise a digital humanities project that analyzes, curates, archives, or presents a local event, object, collection, or phenomenon that could be the subject of the study of humanities. These can be traditional subjects or digital natives, but your project must, in some way, satisfy the definition of digital humanities we have been exploring this semester.

This project does not have to be undertaken, simply designed and explained. On your blog, explain how your project fits into the digital humanities, why it is worthwhile, and how such a project would be performed. Include in your descriptions specific tools needed and provide links to similar projects, similar tools, and the subjects in question. These descriptions should be comprehensive--between five and seven paragraphs, and featuring at least three links to help illustrate your ideas.

This project is due May 20, 2016 at a reasonable time of day (please don't make me stay up until the wee hours!).

Final Digital Stories

For your final digital story, due May 6, you will tell the story of your encounter with digital humanities this semester. It should focus on your experiences with the course and key concepts encountered this semester, but the story is otherwise open to your interpretation. Clearly, this need be a digital story, much like the one you made earlier in the semester, but whether you wish to use metaphor or symbols to tell your story, or be quite literal, is up to you (although I am secretly rooting for at least a little of the former).

You will be evaluated on how well you incorporate key concepts from the course into the story. The concepts you choose to include should probably be those that have had an impact on you, or connect with some of your larger interests. Feel free to tie this into your final project, if you wish.

The Art Curation Project

Your art curation project will involve three elements: a platform like Artsteps, (you don't have to use this exact platform, of course, but it should do the trick) at least ten images of Matisse's work from the Cone Collection (found on our shared drive) and Gertrude Stein's "Matisse" from Three Portraits of Painters. Using Stein's piece as a guide, curate a virtual space using at least ten pieces of Matisse's work. I expect each displayed piece to include a quote from "Matisse" to help guide the viewer, plus any other material you deem necessary. You should not explain the curation in the gallery--instead, post a companion piece in your blog explaining your choices.

Quick Digital Story

For your quick digital story, write a story and use images and narration to tell that story. The purpose of the assignment is to familiarize yourself with some editing tools, and become comfortable with Youtube. Eventually, you will post a digital story about your digital humanities experience, but this first one can really cover any topic as long as it tells a story with images and narration.  

GIS Project for ENG 208

This assignment requires you use your ArcGIS account that is connected to our ENG 208 group. First, each of you is responsible for a section of the campus:

          Michael--Havre de Grace, Maryland, Fallston, Joppa
          Richaun--Bel Air, Student Center, Susquehanna, Belcamp
          Melissa--Aberdeen, Edgewood, Chesapeake, Darlington

For each building, you will be responsible for mapping five to ten points on the "ENG208 GIS Architecture" layer. You should all be able to contribute to the same map.

Each point should contain a photograph of an architectural feature of the building, (at least two of the required points must feature architectural features from inside the building) the name of the building, and, in the description, a quotation from one of the assigned readings and an explanation of how this quotation relates to the photograph.

By Friday, March 11, you need to write a blog post outlining some of your plans for the project. Ideally, this post will contain a few photographs and some quotations you are planning to map. The final GIS project is due Friday, March 25.

Some Rubricy Details for the Text Mining/Data Visualization Assignment

The core of this assignment is that you engage in text mining or data visualization tools, such as those at Voyant Tools that we used in the Frank Norris project.

First, you are to strip down the text files for your assigned range of issues of IF: Worlds of Science Fiction. These files should be uploaded to our class Google Drive (DH) so all students can access the entire corpus. Then, based on your reading, (at least one issue of the magazine's run) you will design a text mining or data visualization project using this corpus. This project can take many forms, but should be justified based on your reading. I suggest building word lists based on themes you discover through reading or based on the time period you are exploring.

How you use the tools is up to you. While I do want to see a project that attempts to explore several key ideas, (don't just generate a single word cloud and be done) these ideas could cut across several smaller explorations, or encompass a single, larger one. Remember that projects are not definitive. You are also not meant to be masters of the technology or the material--there will be questions raised, and results that do not fit in with your expectations. Be prepared to fail, but keep in mind that failures are part of humanities, especially the digital humanities. Fail well.

You are to blog about this project and should include the following:

    -Description of your process and the thinking that led to its development.

    -Description of your results and your interpretation. How much more information might you need? How could this process or project be improved moving forward? What did you learn about the literature and the process?

    -Description of challenges you faced, and how that may change what you try if you had a future project. What might other students behind you need to know to build on your work?

   -What is the value of such examinations? What can we learn about literature? Are there limitations that simply cannot be overcome?

I would love to see some examples included in your blog--sample data or visualizations.