Final Project

Your final project will be an open collaborative project of your choice that has to do with the digital humanities, digital media, and the topic of equality or social justice.

Project A: Twitter analysis inspired by Lisa Nakamura’s essay “The Unwanted Labour of Social Media: Women of Color Call Out Culture As Venture Community Management”

• Kevin
• Pirzada
• Amara
• Deven
• Jamie

Project B: Text Analysis of Dartmouth Commencement Speeches using Voyant and possibly other tools.

• Fiona
• Katy
• Abby
• Raul
• Amir

Since each project has 5 collaborators, I have very high expectations for the amount and quality of work that you will yield. Knock my socks off! (Hint: Play to your teammates’ strengths and distribute the work, but without siloing collaborators. You may want to use an app, such as the one my project team uses called Slack (slack.com), to communicate as a team while you work on your own.)

This assignment will include 3 parts:

1. The project itself (50%)
2. Supporting documentation  (minimum 4 polished pages, 1 per project, plus your credits addendum) that is your rationale for your project. This is your chance to perform a critical analysis of your own project. (25%)
   • What argument does the project make? What questions will it help its audience to answer?
   • What did you build?
   • Critical analysis of your process (not just your final product): Why did you make the editorial and technical decisions that you did?
   • How do your tools, methodologies and processes, and final product reveal injustices and inequalities? Do they attempt to correct injustices, as well? How might your processes and tools be complicit in the structures of injustice that you work to critique despite your best efforts?
   • How could you improve your project?
   • Will your project live beyond the confines of our Winter term? (It does not have to.) If so, where, and who will maintain it?
   • Credits: This section is an addendum and should not be part of your 4 pages (it will be attached to the end, so you will have more than 4 pages total). Please write in detail what each member of your team accomplished on this project. It is incumbent upon you to be honest about what team members accomplished. Deep analysis and interpretation of the project at all stages will be considered as equally important as technical contributions.
3. Each student will write a 3-page critical review of your peers’ project. [Hint: this is the same assignment you performed for your midterm essay, but this time you are using your skills to evaluate your peers’ project. Use the assignment guidelines.] The quality of your review will also be applied to your final project grade. Use what you learned from your midterm review to do an even better job on this one. You will only be turning in a Word doc on Canvas (no blog post this time). (25%)

Grading: Every member of a team will receive the same grade for the team’s work as a whole, and this includes your team’s documentation. Your critical review of the other team’s project will be a grade unique to each individual. So: project (50%) and documentation (25%) are the same for every member of a team, and critical review (25%) is a unique grade for each student.

Due date for final projects: March 8. Final projects must be complete and ready for a showcase from 3:30-4:30! We will advertise our event and invite members of campus to come to Bartlett 201 to see our work. Each project group will prepare a 15-20 minute presentation/demonstation of their work that is coherent, meaningful, and exciting. We will have 20 minutes for questions at the end.

Due date for your peer final project evaluation: March 12 by 3pm, turned into Canvas. Format: Word document. There are no extensions I can grant for this assignment – we’re up against the end of the term.