This page contains a checklist of all that should be completed by 17 December, 11:59pm. NO EXTENSIONS.

 

I will be holding additional office hours during the days of 15-16-17 December.  Please contact me to book your time if you know you will be coming. 

 

All work should be completed in your web hosting.  If you choose to delete anything, please do not do so until after you receive your grade. 

 

Short blog writing (40%)   (5 total, i.e., graded on a 10 point scale)  The blog prompts are listed in the body of the syllabus.  I will drop the worst grade, but be careful about choosing not to do one.  You must do blog #3 about Mumbai and spatial change using ArcMap georeferencing.  You can refer to the rubric that I created for digital humanities blog writing. 

 

Final project  (40%) 

Make sure that all pages are visible as links in the theme so that all of your work can be found easily.  If I am unable to find your work because I do not know the link, I will not be able to grade it. 

There are two parts to the final project.  

 

PART 1: The collective project (15%) will begin about a third of the way into the class and will finish by the end of November. We have worked up a dataset extracting the data of business locations from the 1930 Syrian-American Directory Almanac.

In the collective project, you are asked to identify together aspects of the dataset that you find relevant and to create a story map from it.  Please use the geolocated dataset to make a handful of maps that illustrate some of the dataset’s contours (including a map symbology that illustrates the richness of the data).  You are encouraged to use historical photographs, documents or any other ancillary documentation that will complement the maps that you have put together. 

In addition to one story map (on behalf of the whole group) please make sure that you write a page about the experience of working together. Describe what work was done by you and the others.  Be specific in describing how you used the diverse skills on your team to come up with a great end product.  Your writeup should be 500 words long, should be written individually and should include a link to the page.  If you would like you can embed the storymap in your WP page (using Taylor’s instructions).

If you would like one of your pages to redirect to a story map, that is, you do not want to embed the story map in your WP, you can try inserting 

<li><a href=”http://link to story map”>Story Map</a></li> in the title of a new page that you create.

 

PART 2: The individual project (25%) will be experimental and necessarily small in scope, but will require reflective analysis and contextualization. We will begin to work on these around the midterm and continue through the semester. You may or may not reach conclusion of the project.  I will be assessing you on how well you describe the process as well as the end product. 

The individual project will be presented in blog format online–there should be a total of about 1000-1500 words of writing across multiple pages in the site.  In addition to a map, shapefiles or a storymap, there should be at least 3 clear visuals that help me understand your project. Your final project should be written up in one of more pages in your WordPress (not a post, but pages) or as a storymap.  The final format is of your choice, but this might look like a set of pages with parent-child attributes (see the bottom right when you are editing a page). The final project should be visually rich, illustrating not only the final “results” of your project, but also speaking about the process of your project. 

Ideas for the final project could include any aspect of digital spatiality that we have studied.  You can use any of the methods from the semester (or a combination of methods) to reach your goal. 

Here are some general topics that your final project should address:

  • the general research question that you set out to explore (e.g., why there are repetitions of objects in human space, the proximity of things to other things, why texts mention certain places repeatedly, what kinds of issues have a spatial / locational dimension to them, why certain places are “undermapped” or are in need of “remapping,” etc). 
  • the spatio-temporal context of your subject
  • how your project fits or doesn’t fit into, or even perhaps resists, the shape of data 
  • how thinking about data helped your understanding about the spaces mentioned in your project.
  • if the project deals with other datasets not mentioned above, include them for download. 
  • a reflection of how you yourself are inscribed into the project (does the observer distort the observation? what of your personal interests or subjectivity can be found here?)
  • your thoughts on whether this project is scalable (can it be made bigger?)
  • your thoughts on how you designed the project in the beginning changed over the course of the project
  • any print works can be cited in a “works cited” at the bottom of the page; web links can be embedded throughout. 

If your final project gets long, consider splitting it across a few pages.  This is your opportunity to look back on the class, the learning outcomes, the course description and to reflect on what you have done (or want to learn more about) in this project. Be as creative as you like.  A certain amount of repetition between this section and blog #4 is normal, but if you do not want to repeat you can include a link pointing back at it. 

If you want to link to a web map or a story map from a page link on your blog, you can try inserting <li><a href=”http://link here”>Name of Page here</a></li> in the title of a new page you create. 

The data should be available for download for a public audience in a standard format csv (or tsv), shp from a link in your blog posting. 

 

VERY LAST STEPS: Create a backup of your web hosting.  

Instructions here.  

In your web hosting dashboard: Files -> Backup -> Full Backups
 
You download a full backup in a .gz format and upload it here, describing it.
 
Then, upload your dataset here, describing it. 

Your course work will not be counted if it is not submitted in backed up form.  Nothing will be archived without your permission–if you choose to keep your work private, it will not affect your grade.