You can learn a lot about a digital humanities project by “reverse engineering” it. What went into this project? What are its sources? What’s going on under the hood? If it breaks, who fixes it? And a natural extension of exploring how a DH project was made is thinking about why it was made. Why make a digital project and not something more conventional, like a book or journal article?
This lab asks you to figure out how a digital humanities project was made, and to speculate why it was made digitally.
Specs
- 1000-1250 words
- Answers the 5 questions in the Analysis section completely and accurately
- Discussion section applies ideas from this week’s readings to the digital project in question
- Discussion section offers non-obvious insights about the digital project in question
- Both sections make their points in clear and concise ways
- The work contains no more than 3 grammatical, spelling, or other “mechanical” errors.
- The work contains no more than 2 minor factual inaccuracies and no major factual inaccuracies.
- Upload PDF to Canvas
Getting Started
- Watch Miriam Posner’s video How Did They Make That: Reverse Engineering Digital Projects. Give yourself plenty of time to watch it. It’s about 40 minutes long. Posner breaks down several digital projects, looking at what makes them tick.
- Pick a digital project from same list we used for the initial blog post. This will be the project you “reverse engineer.” For the sake of variety, select a different digital project from what you blogged about.
Digging In
Explore the project thoroughly. Look at all the components, read the background or about information, and even use your browser’s View Page Source tool. Take notes, look up terms and technologies you don’t recognize (Wikipedia is fine).
Analysis (about 500 words)
Posner suggests breaking down a digital project into three categories: sources, processed, and presented. You’ll do exactly that for your analysis, plus a few more questions to consider. Address the following prompts in your analysis:
- What is it? This is a short description of the DH project, using either the categories Posner talks about at the beginning of the video, or the genres and methods we read about in the Digital_Humanities book.
- Who made it? Who did the labor for this project? What are their credentials and backgrounds? Where did the funding come from?
- Sources. What’s the raw material that comprises the project? What files, images, text, data, videos, sound, documents, and artifacts make up the project? Where do they come from?
- Processed. How are the sources made machine-readable? What sort of tools and techniques were used to process the sources and make them usable for this project? What would you need to know in order to process the sources (in terms of software, hardware, and disciplinary knowledge)?
- Presented. How are the processed sources presented to the audience? What sort of tools and platforms are used to make the sources human-readable? What would you need to know how to do in order to use these tools and platforms?
Discussion (about 500-750 words)
In your discussion, synthesize what you’ve learned about the project with some of the questions that have come up in our readings for the week. You don’t have to consider all of these questions; they’re merely here to get you started. Pursue the questions that are most interesting to you.
Some questions to consider in your discussion:
- How does the digital form enable new ways of understanding the source material? What’s the added value of the digital form over a more conventional printed form? What’s lost?
- What specific meaningful choices did the creators have to make, and how did those choices impact the overall shape and message of the digital project?
- How would you apply some of the principles from the first two chapters of Data Feminism to this project? For example, how does the project help us to articulate the matrix of domination concerning the source material? Or, given D’Ignazio and Klein’s distinction between data ethics and data justice, where does this particular project fall? Are there certain aspects of the project and the way it was made that contribute to its sense of data justice?
Submission Details
- Submit the 1000-1250 word lab report as a PDF to Canvas by the end of the day (local time) on Saturday, June 18
- You can write the report in Google Docs, Word, Pages, or another application. Just be sure to save as a PDF