Due: Monday 26 October Length: 1000-1500 words

Write a short proposal of a digital project or data analysis that you might undertake if you had the necessary data and skills. That is to say, draw up your hypothetical, dream DH project. You’ll want to consider the scholarly questions you will ask (and attempt to answer) by carrying out the project, as well as the history and critical discussion around the kind of DH project that you’ve chosen.

Though you may choose to take up some of this proposal for your final, this is not a proposal for your final project for this class. I don’t expect that anyone will be able to complete a large DH project by the end of our short ten weeks. Instead, in this proposal you can be ambitious and think in specifics about what project you might like to enact over the long term. You can think up a project that you’d like to complete as part of your graduate work or something that might take many years longer than that. This is your chance to get creative and explore widely.

Some general areas of DH projects you might consider are:

  • Text analysis or corpus linguistics projects that examine/quantify text as data
  • Digital archives and resources that provide a website or application for others to explore
  • Statistical analysis or computational projects that examine tabular datasets
  • Data visualization or network analysis projects that make information visible
  • Large-scale investigations of social media or public digital resources

There are many possibilities, and the next few weeks of readings and projects will provide some examples that I hope will make the field of possibility more clear. I’m very happy to talk over potential project ideas based on your interests. The Digital Humanities Literacy Guidebook is a terrific place to get a sense of the many avenues you might take.

The proposal itself can be written as a single prose narrative or broken up into short paragraphs, lists, and illustrations. You’re welcome to include images and even hand-drawn diagrams of what you expect or hope to produce.