The first step in developing a digital humanities project is selecting a topic, and it may be helpful to organize your project around answering a central question.
Tips for formulating your question:
- Ask what you are passionate about and what you enjoy spending time on.
- Think about issues your field continually argues about. Remember, the question may not be new to your discipline, but the approach might be.
- Know that a good research idea is more about communication than creativity. The question, as well as your approach, needs to be clear.
- Understand that digital project ideas are built, not discovered.
A project:
- is a sequence of related activities with a definite beginning and end.
- is derived from a central question, issue, or problem.
- requires resources.
- requires an audience and/or other participants.
- results in a product or service.
Examples of products: events (meeting, workshop, conference, symposium); research (analysis, investigation, experiment, monograph); methodologies/tools (code, website, curriculum)
Projects are about: telling a story, writing an argument, answering a question, developing a theory.
5 Parts of a Research Project:
- question, problem, provocation
- sources (primary or secondary)
- analytical/discovery activity
- audience
- concrete products (deliverables)
Types of Digital Humanities Projects:
- those that produce humanistic knowledge (e.g., building digital exhibits, text encoding)
- those that discover existing knowledge (e.g., by digitizing and making available materials to other people, or crowdsourcing the transcription of audio)
- those that analyze knowledge (e.g., text mining, mapping the flow of historical letters)
- those that preserve knowledge (e.g., bit curation)
