Skip to main content

Thoughts After Class - Week 12


Thanks for going over all the details about the final project, midterm grade, etc. It’s always helpful to me to go back through everything, even if we’ve already discussed it several times.

Peer Review Comments

The Jane Project: This is such a neat project! I would definitely love to interact with the final result! My favorite part “Mapping Janes” page. The idea of there being a standard “Jane” throughout history and how the name “Jane” is used and associated with various things could easily lead to really interesting research and discussion.

Western Fiction Novels of Zane Grey: Greg mentions also incorporating some video clips featuring scenes from Zane Grey movies that show specific locations. I was thinking it might be interesting to perhaps include a specific passage from a Zane Grey novel where he describes a specific location and provide a side-by-side of his written description of a location and an actual image or video of the location. I think it would be interesting to see how effectively a written description of a location can convey the actual visual experience of seeing some of these places.

The Loves of Cass McGuire: I’ve never read this play, but the description of this project makes me want to read it.

Dragons in Literature: Jennifer mentions creating a tree to illustrate the connections between all of the dragons. I’ve seen a couple of presentations where people used the Smartdraw tool to create tree diagrams. I’ve never used this tool before, but it looks like it would be fairly easy to use, and its free. 

My Project Progress

Overall, I feel like my project is coming together nicely. As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, I will be focusing on Steinbeck’s nonfiction work in my dissertation, so that’s what I also chose to focus on for this project. Steinbeck had connections to many notable people and events throughout the twentieth century, and I would like for my project to illustrate those connections to events and people.

Currently, I’m focusing most of my enery on completing the “About” section. This is the portion of the project that I am most overwhelmed by, and I’m worried about effectively “connecting all the pieces” of my project and everything we have covered this semester. It’s coming together, but I feel like there’s still a lot to be done. I’ll probably be spending a good chunk of time on this part of the project over the weekend.

I’m still a little confused about exactly how we’re supposed to present our related DH project and other resources. I think I’ve heard Dr. Carter say that each of these portions of the project should list the particular content and then provide a short annotation or our rhetorical precis. Is this correct? Did I understand the instructions correctly?

Also, I’m terrible with titles. So, the brief discussion about titles from this week’s class meeting really got me thinking, and I really haven’t gotten anywhere as far as an interesting and engaging title goes.

Here’s the link to my project site. As I’m sure is the case with nearly everyone, it’s obviously still a draft; a work in progress. Any comments, suggestions, or feedback are appreciated.

Comments

  1. ShannonApril 17, 2019 at 5:15 PM

    Your presentation of your final project will look a lot like the one you did for the existing DH project you presented to the class. You won't need to present each part. Not going to be time for that. Hopefully you'll find this useful: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2271010/dh-613/items/collectionKey/4TUM5JN6/itemKey/GCVPH5GM

    On the "about" page: you won't need to connect your project to everything we've read/discussed this term, just the bits you find most relevant. The goal is to situate this project as part of the conversation, but as we discussed via the Burkean Parlor metaphor: you'll be huddled up in conversation with only some of the people in the DH parlor, not the entire room. Pull from the stuff that most directly relates. First thing that comes to mind with respect to your project is the Republic of Letters project mapping we discussed during the first day of class. Something like that. I hope that helps.

    As far as the title: Don't spend tons of time and energy on this. Sometimes the perfect title hits. Sometimes it simply doesn't. Some of the Dh projects we explored together had really clever project titles. Many don't. It's just a flourish to consider. It's not the main point.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thoughts Before Class - Week 3

Before the semester I really had no idea what digital humanities was. Then, after our first class meeting, I went from knowing absolutely nothing about digital humanities to becoming extremely overwhelmed. At this point, after making my way through some of the readings over the past couple of weeks, I feel like I'm starting to have a little better understanding of what the term means and what the field consists of. I have also quickly learned that the field of DH is extremely broad and reaches many different disciplines, but also offers lots of opportunities for interdisciplinary connection. The readings for this week include the introductions to The Emergence of the Digital Humanities and Doing Digital Humanities . I read The Emergence of the Digital Humanities first and was a little surprised at the detail and attention given to 3D Printers. And while I may not have completely understood the whole point the author was trying to make, one particular idea did resonate with me. ...
2 comments
Read more

New Digital Worlds - Roopika Risam

So, I was scrolling through #AcademicTwitter the other day and I stumbled across Roopika Risam's twitter account . After reading New Digital Worlds , I obviously had to check it out. It turns out, she has a very active Twitter presence. She shares a lot of information about her own scholarly work as well as interesting work by other similar scholars.  I felt a little bit like an academic fangirl when I stumbled across her account, and I thought some of you guys might also want to check her out. 
1 comment
Read more

More Thoughts About The Final Project

I've been thinking about my final project a lot lately. And, as I've mentioned before, I'm working with John Steinbeck and his biographical and non-fiction works. I haven't been able to find many digital projects specifically about Steinbeck, and I was a little worried that I might not have a clear enough idea of exactly what I want to do. I've mentioned before that I'm going back and forth between the ideas of a timeline project or a mapping project.  In class, Katie shared a really great timeline project, the Victorian Women Writers Project. I was super excited to see this project because it was really similar to the timeline ideas I have for my Steinbeck project. I spent a little time looking around this website and I was thinking about how I could adapt this to my own ideas. But, although this timeline is really helpful, I still can't shake the mental images I have for a mapping project.  So, as Dr. Carter mentioned in class, I started looking aroun...
1 comment
Read more