Project 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, critical path scheduling, understanding roles and responsibilities, risk management, documenting your project work, writing your first grant proposal, budget setting and controls, building the project team, and selecting and implementing project management tools and software. This is an advanced course and, as such, you are expected to have an understanding of the definition of digital humanities. Materials will be covered through lectures, discussions, presentations, and hands-on activities. 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 workshop, we 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.
Simon Appleford
email: sjappleford [at] gmail [dot] com
twitter: @sjappleford
Jennifer Guiliano
email: jenguiliano [at] gmail [dot] com
twitter: @jenguiliano
Syllabus
| Session 1 | Class Session | |
| 9:30 – 9:50 | Introductions | |
| 9:50 – 10:45 | 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) |
|
| Session 2 | Working Session | |
| 1:00 – 1:45 | Statements of Innovation and Humanities Significance | |
| 1:45 – 2:30 | Four Elements Outline | |
| Session 3 | Working Session | |
| 2:45 – 4:00 | Your First Statement of Innovation Your Statement of Humanities Significance |
| Session 4 | 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?) |
|
| 10:15 – 10:45 | Concrete Products (What constitutes the products of a project? How do you judge the scale of your products?) |
|
| Working Session | ||
| 10:45 – 12:00 | Partners and Project Teams Concrete Products |
|
| Session 5 | Class Session | |
| 1:15 – 1:45 | Technologies for Digital Humanities (intro to basecamp, google docs, etc) |
|
| 1:45 – 2:45 | Wrangling Your Data (Introduction to data management; Github; and versioning; principles of accessibility, transferability, and hosting) |
|
| Session 6 | Working Session | |
| 3:00 – 3:45 | Project Development with Students | |
| 3:45 – 5:00 | Tech to Manage Your Data Wrangling Data |
| Session 7 | Class Session | |
| 9:30 – 10:30 | Principles of Workplan Development (What’s a workplan? How does it work? What do you do when it doesn’t?) |
|
| Working Session | ||
| 10:45 – 12:00 | Building Your First Workplan | |
| Session 8 | Class Session | |
| 1:00 – 2:15 | Principles of Budget Design Homework: Building Your First Budget |
| Session 9 | Class Session | |
| 9:30 – 10:15 | Charters, Agreements, and Handshake Deals | |
| 10:15 – 11:00 | Branding, Marketing and Publicizing your Project | |
| Working Session | ||
| 11:00 – 12:00 | Branding and Publicizing your Project | |
| Session 10 | Class Session | |
| 1:15 – 2:00 | Evaluating Your Project and Team Members | |
| 2:00 – 2:45 | Project Documentation & Disseminating Results (project documentation, white papers, final reports, articles, blogs, and publicity) |
|
| Session 11 | Discussion Session | |
| 3:00 – 5:00 | All About Problems (When projects or members go awry? Who’s in charge? What happens when you fail?) |
| Session 12 | Class Session | |
| 9:30 – 10:30 | Finding Funding | |
| 10:45 – 12:00 | Your First Grant | |
| Session 13 | Class Wrap-Up | |
| 1:00 – 1:30 | Next Steps | |
| 1:30 – 2:30 | Discussion |