Mini-project

To help focus your learning this week, you’ll complete a “mini-project” around a research question of your choice. This can be a very informal goal that allows you to produce a small outcome by the end of the week: e.g., a set of intriguing search results from EarlyPrint tools; a short transcription of an early modern book you’re working on; a single visualization or quantitative finding about a word or a genre; a short investigation of an early modern person.

I’ll work with you to refine your ideas, and we’ll workshop these during some of our afternoon sessions. As you develop a research question, here are some guidelines:

• If you already have a topic you want to investigate, is there a small component that you might tackle over the next few days? (And if all you do is take the first few steps, that’s great!)
• Consider the categories on this site: is there a specific book/word/person/place/idea you’re interested in? Choosing just one thing could help guide you toward specific methods.
• As we learn different techniques (i.e. text mining, network analysis, machine learning), which one are you most drawn toward? You could organize your mini-project around trying out that technique.

Remember that your ideas and plans can change throughout the week; this is a chance to experiment! During Friday afternoon’s show-and-tell, you’ll have a chance to chat about your mini-projects with members of the other classes. Again, these will be really informal chats, and as we go along we’ll make a plan for how to show what you’ve done.

Please ask lots of questions and feel empowered to try new things. We want to make this week as useful to your own work as possible!