In addition to weekly participation, you will also be responsible for designing, presenting, and documenting a DH workshop. While workshops are not always considered scholarship, they have become one of the hallmarks of DH research and teaching. Depending on your skills and interests, your workshop might be framed around a research question in the humanities, a particular DH methodology or toolkit, or a specific humanities dataset or digital collection. For example, if you are interested in working with medieval manuscripts, you might design a workshop around a particular collection of folios and how one can work with tools to extract data from these manuscripts. Or if you want to work with social media data, you might design a workshop around a particular platform and dataset.

There is no definitive answer of what makes a workshop digital humanities-focused, but you will be expected to share a rationale for why your workshop does count as DH (feel free to use example DH projects and audiences to help explain your choices). I realize that many of you may be unfamiliar with the workshop format. This prompt is incredibly open-ended, which may be disorienting and overwhelming. That’s why you will have the lab workshop sessions and milestones throughout, to help you stay on track (though remember needing to revise or switch directions is often a key part of developing a DH workshop). You are welcome to work individually or in a group, though groups will be expected to produce more extensive workshops (not quite double the work, but more than what one individual could produced). You are also welcome to use tools or data or readings that we have discussed in class, but you are not required to do so. If you do use materials we have discussed in class, you will be expected to engage with them in a new way whether that’s building from in class workshops or using new framing, and not simply repeat what we have done in class.

Workshop Proposal 10%

Due Oct 5, 2023 (Extension Possible Until Oct 12, 2023)

⚡️ More information about developing your workshop is available here

The first part of the project is developing a workshop proposal. You should envision this as your pitch for the workshop, and should consider the type of audience and format that would be most compelling for your workshop (whether that’s a humanities department, a DH lab, a digital scholarship unit in a library, or a summer institute, etc…).

Your initial proposal should:

  • outline your proposed focus for the workshop and explain what problem this workshop aims to help resolve (what are your initial workshop goals, what are you trying to teach or study, and why this topic?)
  • outline your proposed plan for developing the workshop (do you already know how to use the materials in your workshop or do you still need to learn how? If still learning, what is your plan for starting to experiment? how will you organize the workshop and what is your rationale for your proposed structure? What methods or tools, and datasets or digital objects do you plan to use? If using data, do you have access to it already or do you need to find it or create it?)
  • explain your initial goals of this workshop in relation to the readings and topics we have discussed in class (what are the scholarly goals of your workshop and how would you situate it in relation to digital humanities? Who are your audiences and what scholarship does your workshop draw upon?).

The proposal should be no shorter than 3 pages and no longer than 6 pages double spaced, and can contain tables, graphs, bullet points, or any other format that will help you outline the goals and plan for this workshop. Ultimately, this proposal should lay the groundwork for your workshop and will serve as your blueprint for the remainder of the semester.

As you are developing your proposal, I would highly recommend trying to attend at least one of the Savvy Researcher workshops hosted by Mary Ton in the library (calendar is available here https://uiuc.libcal.com/calendar/savvy?cid=15337&t=g&d=0000-00-00&cal=15337&audience=4666&inc=0).

Workshop Presentation 15%

Due Nov 16, 2023 (Extension Possible Until Nov 23, 2023)

Once your proposed workshop is approved, you will begin working on it culminating in a “test-run” presentation of your DH workshop. While most DH workshops have audiences, increasingly many are happening remotely without any synchronous audience engagement. Therefore, this presentation will mimic this new reality, and be recorded virtually and shared with your peers in the course, who will then provide feedback and suggestions for your workshop (more on that below). Presentations should be ~20-40 minutes in length (ideally no longer than 60 minutes), and you are welcome to use any video recording platform. More details will be provided closer to the submission date.

Workshop Feedback 5%

Due Nov 30, 2023 (Extension Possible Until Dec 7, 2023)

Each student will watch at least one workshop once posted, and provide feedback to the presenter. Group assignments for watching materials are available here. This feedback is intended to help the presenter improve their workshop and should be constructive and respectful. While watching the presentation you should attempt to follow any of the steps and detail your experience completing the workshop.

You have two options for submitting feedback. You can either complete the feedback via Google Form (available on the Canvas Assignment page) or use this Workshop Feedback Template (available here as a file to download or from our course GitHub repository https://github.com/ZoeLeBlanc/is578-intro-dh/blob/gh-pages/assets/files/feedback_form_template.md) and submit it via email or Slack to the Instructor. The instructor will distribute the feedback to the presenter.

Final Workshop Submission 20%

Due Dec 18, 2023

⚡️ If you need another day or two, you can take it for submitting your final workshop but final grades are due Thursday December 21, so please try your best to submit by this date. Thank you!

The final piece of your semester-long project is submitting your workshop in written form. This final submission is split in two sections:

  • The first half is a written version of your workshop that could be shared publicly with future students or peers interested in the topic. I realize it is tricky to turn a video into a written version, but I would encourage you to use a combination of screenshots and citations to help transform from video to print. You may write this section either individually or collectively, and it should be between 5 and 10 pages double spaced (though this limit is more of a suggestion, just try to avoid excessively long like 30 pages). You’re welcome to use transcription software to help you transcribe the video, but you should still edit the transcription to make it more readable and also will likely need to work a bit on how to transform live demonstrations into walk-throughs of the interface (ideally with screenshots). Also, be sure to include citations to the relevant scholarship, both from the course and beyond.
  • The second section essentially serves as an author’s note/reflection on your experience of learning a new topic in DH. It is intended as a space to explain your pedagogical choices, as well as how crafting the workshop was informed by your experiences learning a new DH topic. This section is a chance to talk about pivots or experiments you tried that didn’t work, and how that experienced lead you to alter your workshop but also understand DH in new ways. This section must be written individually if you did a collaborative workshop, and should be between 3 and 6 pages double spaced (though again this size limitation is a suggestion and not a hard line). You can also include citations in this section, especially to relevant course readings.

In short, the first half of this submission is a written version of your workshop, and the second half is a reflection on your experience of learning a new DH topic and crafting a workshop around it. In terms of the workshop feedback, you should ideally try to incorporate that as much as possible though you can also indicate in the second half of your submission how you would incorporate the feedback if you had more time.

Final Project Submission Logistics

This final submission can be submitted in any format (whether a Markdown file, Word Doc, Google Doc, or PDF). I would prefer that you submit it with your relevant datasets and additional materials via a GitHub repository link that you would share via either Canvas or Slack, but if you don’t have additional materials you can submit just the written document (again via either Canvas or Slack). If you have any questions about this final submission, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the instructor.

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