Week 2
Examining Media-Rich Research and Communication: A Creative Introduction
The project, as Anne Burdick et al. argue in the embedded excerpt, is the "basic unit" of digital humanities scholarship. Because DH projects are both "continuous" and "discontinuous" with traditional forms of humanities research, we need to assess them based on their traditional merits (i.e. use of evidence, argumentation, etc. ) and their digital merits. To assess the digital merits of a project, you might ask:
- How is the project set up?
- Who runs it, and who are stakeholders?
- What are its assets, structure, services, displays and/or interfaces? What values seem to be encoded in these elements?
- Who is the audience for this project? Does the audience already exist? Does the project create a new community?
Some professional humanities organizations, such as the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association, have published their own discipline-specific guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship. The AHA's guidelines can be found here; the MLA's here.
For this week's class locate a digital humanities project related to your research interests and carry out a formal academic review of it. For tips on how to conduct and structure your review read The Public Historian Digital Project Review Guidelines and consult examples published in the journal. Post your review to our course blog and be prepared to present your selected project to the class.
