Due: Monday 7 December

For the final, you’ll complete a paper or short project that contributes to DH scholarship, broadly conceived. I have left this assignment intentionally open-ended to allow you to choose from among the many scholarly genres that we have explored this quarter. I also want you to be able to make this assignment as useful and reusable as possible—if there is a way you can fit this assignment into your larger graduate work, I would welcome that.

Your final can either take the form of a seminar paper or a combination of a shorter essay and accompanying digital objects: data sets, visualizations, data analysis results, a website, etc. (What you wind up making will be dependent on your choice of project/topic.) A seminar paper should be about 5000-6000 words, and an essay accompanying a digital project should be about 2500-3000 words.

Here are some possible options:

A seminar paper that takes up a debate within the field of digital humanities, its history or its theory. Risam’s book, the essays in the Debates in the Digital Humanities volumes, or Laura Estill’s “Digital Humanities’ Shakespeare Problem” are excellent examples of this genre. This may be an expansion of things you began thinking about in the DH Project Review assignment, but it can also be something new.
A paper that critiques a particular technology or class of technologies, with respect to that technology’s history and its social impacts and with perhaps some discussion of how it works. Good models here include Benjamin and Noble’s books, as well as Data Feminism, and even Weingart’s “The Route of a Text Message.” This could take the form of a seminar paper, or it could include some elements of visualization and data analysis.
A digital project that takes up some part of the proposal you made earlier in the quarter. While fulfilling the full proposal will likely not be possible under these time constraints, you may wish to get started on the project you proposed, perhaps by creating and preparing a data set, or by doing some initial data analysis and visualizations, or by beginning work on a website, etc. If you choose this path, you’ll write a shorter essay that explains what you have done and contextualizes your work within the field of DH and the themes of our course.
The same as (3) but with a different, smaller digital project that wasn’t part of your initial proposal.

These are guidelines you can follow, but you should feel free to expand or depart from these models if it would be helpful for your work. I’m happy to talk over potential project ideas.