<oo>→<dh> Digital humanities

Author: Pamella Lach (plach@ku.edu) Maintained by: David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt@gmail.com) Last modified: 2021-12-27T22:03:53+0000

Project planning

General

Discuss the following issues within your project team early in the project planning stage. Document your decisions so that everyone on the team will have access to the same set of answers. The documentation should be clear to the team, to your future self (will you remember, a year from now, why you made the deicisions you made?), and others who may later repurpose or otherwise further develop your data.

Project planning

• What are the goals of the project?
• What are you trying to do?
• For whom?
• What are the possible deliverables?
• Timetables and milestones
• What resources do you have?

Resources

• What types of objects are you working with?
  • How will they be represented as digital data (if not born-digital)?
  • What data types do you need to support?
• How will data be handled?
  • How will your data be collected?
  • Who will collect it?
  • How will you verify, validate or otherwise clean your data?
• At what point(s) (if any) will the data need to be web accessible?
• What sort of security do you require? Any privacy issues?

Data processing

• What needs to be done to the data at various stages of the project?
  • What form are the data currently in?
  • What form do they need to be in?
• What do you want to do with the data in a project – how will they be handled in the project?
  • What type of visualizations, if any?
  • What type of analyses, if any (or stories you want to tell)?

Persistence, interoperability, extensibility

• What format is most flexible and persistent (e.g. SQL, XML, CSV)?
• Is there a metadata standard that should be used?
• How to predict a model for future growth?
• How to plan for integration/interoperability with other data sets and database systems, now and in the future?
• What sort of data management and sustainability plan is necessary for short-, medium-, and long-term (NIH, NSF, NEH requires)?*

Usability

• How will users be able to interact with your data?
• How much do you know about your users? Their technology level and interest in the project?

Parameters and models

• What entities, attributes, and relationships do you need (if a relational database)?
• Develop a Data Dictionary
• Is there an existing schema you can adapt (if XML)?
• Are there metadata standards that apply to your data?
• Remember to adhere to best practices for naming conventions (no spaces between words, short but meaningful field/attribute names, start names with letters, etc.)
• Database design, no matter what format, is a highly iterative process

Visualization

• What are my data?
• What do I want to do with my data?
  • What am I trying to see?
  • What stories am I trying to tell?
• What is the best way to visualize the data?
• What would it take to visualize the data?
  • What do I have / What do I need?
• Should I visualize the data?
  • Just because we can, should we?

Tools

• What tools do you need to work with the data?
  • Pre-processing (collecting the data)
  • Processing
  • Post-processing and presentation (analyses, visualizations, etc.)
• Do the tools work across systems (PC, Mac, Linux/Ubuntu)?
• Open source versus proprietary?
• Relational, NoSQL, XML, or basic spreadsheet/CSV (something else)?
• Do other formats, such as temporal or GIS, need to be supported?
• Is there one tool that can do everything, or do you need multiple tools, and if so, what sort of crosswalks do you need?
• Do you need to support collaborative, simultaneous data collection/cleaning/editing/updating?

These project-planning guidelines are reproduced with permission from a workshop conducted by Dr. Pamella Lach (Head, Center for faculty initiatives and engagement, University of Kansas Libraries, plach@ku.edu).