Early in the semester groups of students will identify, though consultation with the instructors, a public domain text (that is, without copyright restrictions) in the humanities that interests them and a set of related research questions, and will work with that text throughout the semester, performing document analysis, developing and implementing a formal structural model, encoding (marking up) the text according to that model, developing programs to perform research with that text, and constructing a web site to publish their research. Each project team will meet weekly for approximately one hour with a project mentor (one of the instructors) outside class for project planning and discussion. This chart provides a rough idea of weekly progress over the course of the semester.
We will manage course projects in an online professional development environment called GitHub, and we’ll explain how it works and what the relevant terms (repo, issue, project, etc.) mean in class, so if you’re reading this at the beginning of the semester, don’t worry about the jargon or the technical details.
Once project teams have been formed, each team will post a weekly project update, in the form of an Issue on the designated TopHat discussion forum, due each Friday. (These weekly postings are per team, not per student, though every team member should be responsible for writing and posting at least once throughout the semester.) These postings should be status reports about your projects and should address four topics: 1) what you accomplished in the preceding week, 2) what you learned, 3) where you got stuck (and how you plan to get unstuck), and 4) what you plan to accomplish in the upcoming week. Reports are typically brief, but they should address both the state of the project in general and the specific weekly contributions of each of the individual team members. The instructors will show you how to use the Projects and Issues tabs in your GitHub repos (which is what we do in our own research) to manage tasks, timeliness, and any impediments you might face. Weekly project update postings should refer (with links) to specific new or revised content on the repo.
Unlike with projects in many other courses, the project evaluation is based not
only on the final product, but also on regular, steady progress on individual
project related tasks, and your instructors will work with you to identify
appropriate weekly goals for your project using Github Projects. Weekly progress
will be graded on the following scale: exceeds target
(A+), meets
target
(A), some progress
(B), minimal progress
(C), no
progress
(F); the lowest two Project Progress grades will be excluded
from the course grade. Because the primary purpose of the project is for
students to learn how to use the Digital Humanities tools and methods employed
by professionals, the instructors will work with you during your weekly project
meetings to help you learn to apply the necessary methods to your own research,
and obtaining your results according to those methods is part of the evaluation
of the project. If your team determines your research needs a technology or
method not taught in depth in the course, please speak with an instructor, who
will help you figure out how to incorporate it. All project components (weekly
progress = 30%, midterm task = 10%, final result = 20%), taken together, are
worth 60% of the course grade.