An alternate project design for my digital humanities class

Topics/tags: CSC 151, Racket, teaching, digital humanities

As I noted in a prior musing, we end [1] each semester of CSC 151 with a two-week final project. In that musing, I described a very open-ended project. Writing about the open-ended project has gotten me to think a bit more about alternatives. In particular, I wonder whether it might be better to have all of the students in the class work on the same collection of materials to provide an environmental scan of the materials [2].

What’s the advantage of restricting the project in this way? In some ways, it means that each student project contributes to a larger whole. There can be a broader sense of accomplishment when you see that, as a class, you have provided a rich collection of materials for others to use. It may be that I can even frame it in such a way that there’s an obvious audience for the work. For example,

A few years ago, Professor Timothy Arner [3] and his students developed [4] The Grinnell Beowulf, a translation of the poem along with appropriate scholarly apparatus to support classroom use. While that work provided Arner with a deep understanding of the material, recently, Arner has been wondering whether the tools of the digital humanities might permit him to discover new aspects of the text and has asked our class to conduct some analyses that might provide some preliminary new directions for his scholarship. Over the next two weeks, you will form small teams, develop new algorithms, and use those algorithms to provide some potential insights into the text.

There are a wide range of opportunities for materials the students can work with, whether hypothetical (someone is probably interested in our Scarlet and Black archives), potential (as in the Arner example), or actual (I’ll need to chat with the CTLA and Project Vivero folks about such issues).

Another advantage of such an approach is that the students won’t have to spend time gathering and, perhaps, reorganizing the materials. That means that they will have more time to spend designing their algorithms and discovering potential areas of interest in those materials.

Are there downsides to the one set of materials approach? Certainly. The materials are likely to be less attractive to the students than materials they choose themselves. Not everyone will care about Beowulf or the Statistical Accounts of Scotland or Cats fanfic or the Scarlet and Black archives or whatever.

Like many things, it’s a balance. And Which approach? could be a good discussion topic for the Obermann group. So let’s see what I can come up with.

Preliminaries

Summary: You will contribute to the analysis of [materials] by developing a new algorithm, applying it to those materials, presenting your findings in both written and oral form, and identifying potential areas of investigation based on those findings.

Purposes: The project will provide [audience] with a richer set of resources and research questions for their study of [materials]. It will also give you the opportunity to explore an aspect of the digital humanities in more depth and to do novel and creative work. We also intend that it will encourage you to reflect more carefully on the design of algorithms.

Collaboration: We encourage you to work in groups of size three. (In class, we will discuss different skills you may want to draw upon in building groups.) You may also choose to work alone or in a group of two or four people. You may discuss this assignment and your work on the assignment with anyone, provided you credit such discussions when you submit the assignment.

Scope: You project should be of a scope that your group can complete it over a two-week period with approximately five hours of work per week per group member.

Introduction

As you may know, [audience] studies [topic]. Recently, they have identified [materials], which they expect will be useful to their study. They have heard that digital humanities techniques can provide new insights into materials and have asked our class to develop algorithms that might support or provide some new directions for their scholarship.

Throughout this semester, we have seen a range of humanistic data and algorithmic techniques for approaching them. But there are many opportunities to do more: We can develop more sophisticated versions of algorithms we’ve already seen, or we can develop new algorithms or approaches. You will do so with [materials].

Stages

Stage zero: Preparation

You will begin by exploring [materials] and considering ways in which you might approach those materials. You can find some starting points below.

You will then form a group and decide upon an approach to the project.

Stage one: Project proposal

Based on those preliminary discussions, you will write a project proposal in which you provide a broad overview of the goals of the project and describe the algorithm or algorithms you intend to implement.

That is, your project proposal should include at least two sections. A project statement, intended for [audience], should explain the goals of your project. Why are you undertaking this study? What do you hope to learn? How might it contribute to their broader understanding of [topic]? An analysis plan, intended for a technical audience (e.g., your classmates) should describe the algorithms you intend to implement and what prior work you will draw upon in implementing those algorithms.

A typical project proposal will be approximately one-and-a-half double-spaced pages. You should write your proposal in narrative form, using correct grammar and spelling.

We will do our best to respond to your proposal promptly. However, given the time constraints of this project, you should move forward to subsequent steps before you receive feedback.

Stage two: Project

You will have about one week to implement your project. That is, you will implement the algorithms you have designed, use those and other algorithms to explore [materials], and, one hopes, come up with some observations that [audience] can use in identifying richer scholarly questions.

You will submit your program code and instructions for using that code.

Stage three: Report

A final project report should accompany your project code. In it, you will once again, provide a non-technical overview of the project along with a more detailed description of the algorithms. You will also discuss your results. In particular, you should suggest ways in which what you have discovered in using the algorithm might provide a starting point for future study and suggest possible directions. Have you identified an opportunity for close reading? Do your results suggest that it would be valuable to look at additional materials? Are there ways in which it would be worthwhile to turn to the literature to gather a broader context? Do we perhaps need to extend algorithms further or try other approaches?

While the third section of your final project will necessarily be new, you may use your project proposal as a starting point for the first two sections. Our experience suggests that both sections will need some revision. You will often find that once you’ve started to use preliminary algorithms on particular inputs, you will change your goals somewhat and even the ways you think about the design of your algorithm. In addition, when you implement an algorithm, you often discover additional issues and subtleties that may lead you to update your description of the algorithm.

Stage four: Lightning presentation

You will give a two-minute presentation to your classmates, [audience], and a select group of visitors during the designated presentation days. In your presentation, you should describe your goals, your algorithm, and your findings. We will also reserve approximately two minutes for questions and answers.

Selected approaches

Some of you will immediately identify an approach you would like to take. However, others may need a few suggestions to get started. Here a few possible starting points.

Topic modeling. You wrote a simple topic modeling algorithm for a homework assignment. You might extend that algorithm, tune it for [materials], and apply it.

Statistical analysis. You might develop tools that allow you to understand some broad features of individual elements, such as sentence length or word choice, and then apply them to unearth potential relationships between different elements of [materials]. Are there structures or words that occur more frequently in some parts or others and what does that say about the relationships between those parts?

Mapping. You might develop algorithms that select place names from [materials] and visualize the use of those place names within the corpus. There are many ways you could treat those place names. You could, for example, show the sequence of the use of names, potentially finding meaning in how name use changes over the work. You could identify the parts of [materials] each place name appears in and use that to reveal similarities and differences. You could look at nearby words and display those as a way of understanding the context in which the place names are used.

Emotion analysis. The approach of sentiment analysis takes a piece of text and identifies the overall sentiment of the piece. Is it primarily positive, neutral, or negative? But it may be more interesting to look at other emotional characteristics? Does a work express anger, or sadness, or confusion? Often, these kinds of analysis are done using machine learning techniques, which we do not expect you to undertake. However, you might choose other characteristics of interest (e.g., particular words or phrases) that you think will help explore such questions.

Visualization. You might explore new ways to visualize [materials], exploring connections based on subject, length, word choice, metadata, and such.

If the short examples above do not suffice, you might spend some time exploring the Web for other possibilities. For example, HyperCities provides a wide variety of projects that you might find of interest.

We will spend some time in class discussing possible approaches to the project and will form groups, in part, based on the approach that you wish to take.

I should expand the list of possible approaches. But I’ll need to sleep on that. I should also provide a bit more detail on each, perhaps with an example, or at least with some sample outputs (maps, texts, whatever) that further illustrates the technique. Expanding the examples will take even more time, and is probably a task for after I’ve written everything else in FunDHum.

[1] Well, nearly the end. There’s usually one more take-home exam.

[2] I take the term environmental scan from my colleague, Erik Simpson. I am not sure that I am using it in the same way that Simpson does.

[3] These days, he’s Associate Dean Timothy Arner.

[4] Wrote. Produced. Created. What’s the right word?

Version 1.0 of 2018-10-28.