Description and Guidelines
View last year’s projects here.
For your final project, you will work with a group to create a web-based mini-site that explores and analyzes a dataset from multiple angles. Your mini-site must contain the following components:
- A full, annotated bibliography.
- A narrative of about 2,000 words that describes your research and findings about the topic you’ve been assigned. Included within the narrative should be:
- At least five data visualizations that explore clearly defined humanities questions.
- At least two maps that display some property of your data related to a humanities question.
- At least one timeline that provides context for your topic.
- Appropriate, appealing, well-captioned and credited illustrations or photographs.
- A clear, full “About” page that contains the following information:
- Full technical descriptions of the three levels of a DH project (sources, processing, presentation), along with full explanations of your reasoning for making the decisions you made at each level. You should cite relevant class readings to give context for these decisions.
- Short bios of each team member, along with a full accounting of who was responsible for what.
- Acknowledgments of the various people who helped you.
- A data critique that explains fully what information is included in your dataset, what information, events, or phenomena your dataset can illuminate, and what your dataset cannot. You should also give your account of the ideological effects of the way in which your sources have been divided into data (your dataset’s ontology).
- Things you might want to include, just for fun (you don’t have to, but why not?): video, audio, slideshows, whatever else you can think of!
More on the Narrative
Your visualizations should be enfolded into the narrative using the “splitting-a-sentence” strategy described by Alberto Cairo (and derived from Javier Zarracina) in these two videos (part 7 gives context; part 8 describes the strategy itself). You may divide the narrative among various pages of your mini-site if you like.
Like any satisfying narrative, yours should have a beginning, middle, and end, and a clear and coherent point. The writing need not be as formal as a typical academic paper but should be polished, grammatical, and contain no spelling or typographical errors. Imagine you’re writing for an intelligent, educated audience which is not an expert on the topic at hand. Remember that your audience could be reading lots of different things on the Web; you need to give them reasons to keep reading your narrative! Your narrative should include full citations, using either the MLA or Chicago format (be consistent) and linking to sources wherever possible.
Hosting and archiving your final project
Every web resource needs to be hosted on a server in order for other people to access it. Your group will purchase its own server space to host your project. We will use Reclaim Hosting, which costs $25 per year and includes your own URL. (If you have server space of your own you’d like to use, please speak to Prof. Posner or Francesca Albrezzi.) Each group will pool its money to purchase its own server space.
At the conclusion of the class, you have the option of maintaining the server that hosts your project (meaning that you will continue to pay for the space) or letting the project expire. You’ll need to decide as a group which you prefer.
Whatever you decide, your group will submit a copy of your site as HTML files so that your project will be permanently archived as a static site on UCLA’s own servers. (Professor Posner will explain how to do this.) This means that while it will look like the site your group has built, you will not be able to update the archived version.