Final Project: Creating a Digital Humanities Project Website

Exhibit, Presentation, and Final Reflection Due: May 2, 2023

(see also below for interim progess report deadlines)

Learning Outcomes

• Use computational data practices to prepare a dataset or datasets for analysis and create usable projects from description, manipulation, and analysis of that data.

• Create a digital humanities resource (i.e., an exhibit) to support research or teaching on a particular topic.

Instructions

This assignment is a culmination of concepts and skills that we will be learning throughout the class, applied to a real-life dataset. Over the course of the project, you’ll familiarize yourself with the raw data, perform data clean-up and any manipulation required to create usable data suitable for analysis, conduct analysis on the data to identify patterns of potential significance, and create visual representations of those patterns. You will then create a digital project site that can display project outputs and provide context for your data. You will have a choice of working with a dataset provided by the instructor or choose a separate dataset or datasets. Additional information about the dataset that can be used for this assignment will be provided separately.

Deliverables and Scoring

This project is worth 100 points in total (please see the attached schedule for details on scoring).

Deliverables will include the following:

• Final Project Updates (5 in total), including solicitation of feedback on exhibit design

• Exhibit Site (in Omeka, ArcGIS, ESRI Classic StoryMaps, or another site approved by the instructor)

• 5-minute Oral Presentation (screen capture in Kaltura or other app of your choice)

• Reflection on Project

Tools Used in This Assignment

Depending upon the data that you choose to work with, this project may use a variety of software tools. Most or all of the tools will have been introduced earlier in the course via the technical exercises associated with course modules. These may include, but are not limited to the following:

• Jupyter Notebooks

• OCR software such as ABBYY FineReader Pro

• OpenRefine or Trifacta Wrangler (for data cleaning)

• TEI editor (any XML reader, such as BBEdit, Atom, or Oxygen, will do)

• QGIS or ArcGIS for geographic data

• R Studio Desktop (for reshaping, summarizing, and plotting data)

• Voyant Tools (for text analytics, topic modeling, and visualization)

Note that you are likely to use a subset of the available tools; your project’s needs will determine what tools are relevant.

For the final part of the project, designing an exhibit, it is recommended that you use one of the following tools:

• Omeka (https://www.omeka.net)—useful for telling stories using collections of objects

• ArcGIS (https://kent.maps.arcgis.com/)—useful for telling stories using geographic data

• ESRI Classic Storymaps (https://storymaps-classic.arcgis.com/en/)—useful for telling stories using geographic data

It is strongly recommended that you familiarize yourself with Omeka, ArcGIS, or Storymaps early on so that you will be comfortable with the basics of the software prior to designing your exhibit. For Omeka, you may find the following tutorials from The Programming Historian to be helpful as you learn how to use the tool.

• Miriam Posner, “Up and Running with Omeka.net,” https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/up-and-running-with-omeka

• Miriam Posner and Megan R. Brett, “Creating an Omeka Exhibit,” https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/creating-an-omeka-exhibit

For ArcGIS, tutorial materials are available here: https://learn-arcgis-learngis.hub.arcgis.com.

For ESRI Storymaps, there are tutorial materials available on the site.

Note:  There may be other tools that would be helpful for your particular project, many of which are open source and thus freely available for use (check out a list here:

http://dhresourcesforprojectbuilding.pbworks.com/w/page/69244319/Digital%20Humanities% 20Tools). For any tools not introduced in this course that you would like to use for your project, you would be responsible for obtaining and learning that tool.

Help with Software Used for This Assignment

The exhibit software suggested for this assignment is Omeka, ArcGIS (for geographic data), and ESRI Classic Storymaps (for geographic data). For those who are having difficulties using these tools, please contact me directly at kgracy@kent.edu. Do not contact the KSU Help Desk, as they have no knowledge of the software used for this course. You can also post to the technical help question board, but you are likely to get a quicker response from me through email. I can also schedule a Zoom session for students if they need more hands-on assistance beyond what can be done via email.

Schedule and Point Assignment for Final Project