Everyone in this course needs to develop proposals for both digital and print projects. Here are a few quick ideas for kinds of projects you might work on.
Examples of print project ideas
- Text analysis: Find a set of digital or digitized documents related to your topic and use some of the text analysis tools we have talked about to dig through them. For example, the Time magazine corpus touches on all kinds of topics in 20th century American history. The key factor here is to go beyond search as a means to find texts and start thinking about using the results of searches and relationships as content for analysis in their own right.
- Your topic on network x: Many social websites offer a multitude of examples for how people are reacting to different kinds of topics. What do yelp and tripadvisor reviews, or Flickr photos and comments tell us about a historical site or museum?
- Analyse and evaluate a museum or archive’s use of social media around your topic: What kind of discussions are going on in Flickr commons on images related to your topic?
- Analyse a video game or games related to your topic: Find a game or games related to your topic and interpret how that game makes use of or interprets history.
Examples of Digital Project ideas:
- Create a web exhibit: Use Omeka or Flickr to put together a curated collection of materials related to your topic. Consider digitizing a small set of objects.
- Launch a blog or podcast: Use Blogger or WordPress to create a blog or podcast. Create a plan for frequency and content of posts, and identify your audience and how you will reach them. Then run your blog for a month.
- Start a thematic wiki: Is there a need to better connect people in your field, or at your school? Develop a plan for how a wiki could provide a space to better connect these folks. It is technically simple but coming up with something that will actually be useful and used is very tricky.
- Build a Interface to a Collection: Find a something in your field that would be much better understood or interpreted through a map, a timeline, or other interface ans think about making that interface using Viewshare.