I had several false starts as I brainstormed for my final project; by the time I had produced a proposal, I still had not satisfactorily raised the project off the ground. I wanted to map the mobility of pregnant women in late Victorian England, but I struggled to piece together a feasible methodology that would allow me to build a theoretically sound argument. After I submitted the proposal, I learned that I would not be able to access the resources (archived women's diaries) I hoped to use as raw data. However, I also realized that even if I were to map such data, it would not produce much of an argument, no matter which of the visualization tools I chose from my limited repertoire. I started to think about the issues inherent to visualizing subjective data in digital literary studies. The proposal exercise was an important step in the process, although my final project took the research in a very different direction. The proposal compelled me to articulate my quandary and share it with my peers and Dr. Sayers; their feedback was invaluable. For the final project, I did incorporate data from my proposal, but as a failed model from which I launched into a productive study of subjective data visualization in the digital humanities.

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Author: Alison Hedley
Word Count: 215

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