Large Project Planning Development
This course will explore the fundamentals of project planning and design including, but not limited to: formulating appropriate disciplinary questions for digital humanities research, investigating digital humanities tools and resources, structuring your first project, understanding roles and responsibilities, designing publicity and websites for your project, documenting your project work, writing your first grant proposal, and managing your budget. This is an advanced course and, as such, you are expected to have an understanding of the definition of digital humanities. Participants will get the most of the course if they arrive with at least some sense of a potential digital humanities project that they would like to develop throughout the course.
By the close of this course, I anticipate that participants will have a better grasp on the fundamentals of developing a project idea from inception to fruition with specific insights into how to fund, manage, and deploy a research idea.
Jennifer Guiliano
email: jenguiliano [at] gmail [dot] com
twitter: @jenguiliano
Syllabus
| Session 1 | Class Session | |
| 9:30 – 9:45 | Introductions | |
| 9:45 – 11:00 | Project Development: The Overview Study | |
| 11:00 – 12:00 | Best Practice Principles of Designing Your First Project (the four elements of a good DH project; how do you know your idea is a good idea) Reading: The Craft of Research, Part III, 3.0-4.4 (pgs. 40-71) |
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| Session 2 | Working Session | Templates |
| 1:15 – 1:45 | Statements of Innovation and Humanities Significance: Writing Your First Abstract | |
| 1:45 – 3:50 | Four Elements Outline Your First Statement of Innovation Your Statement of Humanities Significance |
| Session 3 | Class Session | |
| 9:30 – 10:15 | Building your Project Team and Recruiting Partners (How do you identify what team members you need? How do you solicit partners? What types of stakes do partners have? How do you manage expectations?) |
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| 10:15 – 10:45 | Concrete Products (What constitutes the products of a project? How do you judge the scale of your products?) |
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| Working Session | ||
| 10:45 – 12:00 | Partners and Project Teams Concrete Products |
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| Session 4 | Class Session | |
| 1:15 – 1:45 | Technologies to Manage Your First Project (intro to basecamp, google docs, etc) |
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| 1:45 – 2:15 | Wrangling Your Data (Introduction to data management; Github; and versioning; principles of accessibility, transferability, and hosting) |
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| Working Session | ||
| 2:15 – 3:45 | Tech to Manage Your Data Wrangling Data |
| Session 5 | Class Session | |
| 9:30 – 10:15 | Principles of Workplan Development (What’s a workplan? How does it work? What do you do when it doesn’t?) |
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| Working Session | ||
| 10:15 – 12:00 | Building Your First Workplan | |
| Session 6 | Class Session | |
| 1:15 – 2:00 | Principles of Budget Design | |
| Working Session | ||
| 2:00 – 3:45 | Building Your First Budget |
| Session 7 | Class Session | |
| 9:30 – 10:15 | Charters, Agreements, and Handshake Deals | |
| 10:15 – 11:00 | Evaluating Your Project and Team Members | |
| Working Session | ||
| 11:00 – 12:00 | Drafting Charters and Agreements | |
| Session 8 | Class Session | |
| 1:15 – 2:00 | Project Documentation & Disseminating Results (project documentation, white papers, final reports, articles, blogs, and publicity) |
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| 2:00 – 3:00 | All About Problems (When projects or members go awry? Who’s in charge? What happens when you fail?) |
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| Discussion Session | ||
| 3:00 – 3:45 | Managing Problems |
| Session 9 | Class Session | |
| 9:30 – 10:00 | Next Steps | |
| 10:00 – 12:00 | Discussion |