Final Project Post Guidelines

Assignment Outline

Your final project post is worth 15% of your final grade. This final piece involves both submitting any code, data, or materials you have created for the project (only need to be submitted once if working in a group), and then writing a reflective blog post on your experiences of working on the project that will be posted on the course website.

While blog posts are usually seen as not very intellectual or rigorous, in digital humanities blogging has been a crucial way that scholars have shared information. Though I had to cut our session on blogging for time constraints, we have actually read a number of blog posts over the course of the semester:

• “Which Dh Tools Are Actually Used In Research?” By Laure Barbot, Frank Fischer, Yoann Moranville And Ivan Pozdniakov, December 6 2019 https://weltliteratur.net/dh-tools-used-in-research/
• Posner, Miriam (2015), “Humanities Data, a Necessary Contradiction” https://miriamposner.com/blog/humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction/
• Maciej Cegłowski “Haunted by Data” Idle Words October 1 2015 https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm
• Giorgia Lupi Data Humanism http://giorgialupi.com/data-humanism-my-manifesto-for-a-new-data-wold
• Lincoln Mullen “Isn’t it obvious?” January 10, 2018 https://lincolnmullen.com/blog/isnt-it-obvious/
• Matthew Lincoln “Confabulation in the humanities” 21 Mar 2015 https://matthewlincoln.net/2015/03/21/confabulation-in-the-humanities.html
• Ted Underwood. “Seven ways humanists are using computers to understand text”. June 4, 2015 https://tedunderwood.com/2015/06/04/seven-ways-humanists-are-using-computers-to-understand-text/
• Maciej Cegłowski. “Deep Fried Data” Idle Words. September 27, 2016. https://idlewords.com/talks/deep_fried_data.htm
• Skallerup Bessette, Lee and Quinn Dombrowski. “DSC Multilingual Mystery 2: Beware, Lee and Quinn!”. February 27, 2020. https://datasittersclub.github.io/site/dscm2.html

Using these posts as examples of how you can structure your post, you should write a post of 1000-1500 words and detail your experience of building the final project. This post is a chance to critically reflect on what worked in your final project and what did not, as well as what you might do in the future with this project. Ultimately, the post is intended to be a chance for you to articulate what you learned about computing in the humanities, digital humanities, and how we think and work with data in the humanities. To that end, the post should reference at least four of the readings from class and detail how your project impacted your understanding of digital humanities. You may use whatever citation style you like, but please be consistent.

Assignment Submission

Because the blog post format is public and also very personal, you are welcome to write in which ever way your feel comfortable (perhaps more informal with bullet points or with lots of images), but remember the goal is to still think critically about your experiences and your project. Even if you worked in a group, blog posts are individually authored, and you can certainly reflect on the experiences of either working collaboratively or solo. These final posts and all associated materials (links to code on Github, datasets, reference images) must be submitted by MIDNIGHT on May 16. If you submit later, I cannot guarantee I will have time to grade you before final grades are due, so PLEASE SUBMIT ON TIME!! Submissions should be written in Markdown and happy to provide support on formatting or embedding interactive visualizations.

Assignment Rubric

A/A+ Posts

• Final Project blog posts are written clearly and thoughtfully. They not only describe the project and experiences of working on the project throughout the year, but also reflect on larger themes from the course. This includes bringing in course readings, discussions, and shared relevant materials.
• The blog post also includes reflections on next steps and lessons learned.
• The written submission includes multiple figures, code snippets, and visualizations to help explain relevant findings or aspects of the project.
• All relevant code and data are well documented and available publicly online.
• A+ posts are ones that go beyond the criteria listed here in some manner.

A-/B+

• Final Project blog posts are well-written and describe the project, as well as the experiences of working on the project throughout the year. The post brings in some themes from the course, but may not fully develop their connection to the project.
• The post includes some reflections whether on next steps or lessons learned.
• The post has a few figures or visualizations but could use more to help explain the project.
• Code and data are publicly available but documentation could be improved.
• Overall this post is well crafted, but could use some refinement of either ideas or the writing.

B/B-

• Final Project blog posts describe the project, but largely reiterate previous presentation submissions and struggle to reflect on the process of the project or bring in larger course themes.
• The posts include some reflections but little information on next steps.
• Code and data are partially available but documentation is not well-written.
• This post could use further editing and development.

C+ or below

• Posts outline basics of their project but lack any depth or substantial detail about the process, themes, or findings of the project.
• Posts bring the bare minimum in from the course themes and struggle to fully develop their connection to the project.
• Code and data are not available.