August 20, 2014
DH Project Evaluation
 | TL;DR: For this assignment you will investigate and evaluate a digital humanities project or tool and publish your analysis on the course blog.[1] |
Consider the project’s methodologies, innovations, interpretive power, and design. Your aim will be to help your colleagues understand the projects’ contributions to its discipline and the interdisciplinary digital humanities community.
You may choose a project or tool to evaluate on your own, or from any listed in the Digital Humanities Projects Learnist collection. Any from the latter are fine; if you want to work on one not listed, get my approval first.
As you investigate your project and prepare your evaluation, consider the following questions:
- What are the project’s strengths and weaknesses?
- What assumptions have been made in designing the project? (What are their sources? How is the site designed? etc.)
- What is the project’s primary audience? Is it addressed to other researchers, students, or both?
- How easy is it to use the site or tool?
- Could you see using this project in your own work? Why or why not?
- How does the project connect to other work, either in DH or in its disciplinary field?
- The big one: what does this project contribute to the larger body of knowledge in its disciplinary field? In the interdisciplinary field of digital humanities?
As you are doing this assignment, you should contact the editor(s) or project lead(s) about their work. You will find that most people in digital humanities are very willing to discuss their work, its methodologies, and its innovations.
Since your evaluation will be published on Medium, be sure to cite your sources correctly, embed multimedia, and use links. This is not an essay printed on dead trees, so don’t treat it like one. Submit it via Twitter, and try to comment on one of your colleague’s posts.
note
- ↑ My thanks to Ryan Cordell and his Pecha Kucha Project Presentation, from which I borrowed much of the language and approach for this assignment.
