Practicums are hands-on, small-scale exercises that ask students to experiment at a beginner’s level, or conceptually, with the methods and tools of the digital humanities.

Rationale for Assignment: The aim isn’t technical mastery but getting comfortable enough with these technologies to think about—and think through—their underlying concepts, while discovering which methods and tools might serve a student’s future research. In many cases, the hands-on experience gained in the practicums will feed directly into class discussion.

Outputs from practicum assignments (a file, screenshot, etc.) should be uploaded to a student’s Canvas thread. Assignments are normally due by the time of class on the relevant day so they can be shown to open discussion of the issues involved.

This assignment is meant to accompany your project pitch. It should total 3–5 pages.

Due Wednesday 10/14 before class via Box.

Please create a folder with your name and submit your proposal inside it.

1. Table of contents
2. 250-word Abstract: Provide a clear and concise summary of your project and its contributions. Your abstract should convey what problem you are solving or what question you are answering, as well as your approach and method.
3. List of keywords: You can refer to cmu-lib.github.io/dhlg/topics to help you generate 3–7 keywords for your project.
4. List of participants: This list can be theoretical and include participants by role (e.g. data scientist, book historian, Omeka developer) rather than by name.
5. Environmental Scan: What other DH projects exist that might speak to similar questions as yours? What are they like? What do they do that you will or will not do?
6. Enhancing the humanities: How will this project bolster humanistic research? What are you doing that is novel or unique that would support your response? Who is the audience—you, a broader public? Be specific. Is there a specific text, author, or subject you’re examining that hasn’t been studied in this way? That would also count as enhancing the humanities.
7. Methods: Explain what tools you will use and why.
8. Data management plan: Describe how data will be managed, stored, and documented during development, and how it will be sustained beyond the proposal’s timeline.
9. Timeline for project completion: Create a week-by-week timeline. You’ll have to hold yourself accountable to your plan—doing this also shows how feasible your project is.
10. Bibliography: What do you think you’ll annotate for your annotated bibliography? Create a tentative bibliography (no annotation) with a 250-word rationale.

Students have the choice of completing this assignment in one of two ways. Choose one of the options below.

The final essay is due one week after classes end.

Your final digital project is the culmination of your work across the course, developed from your project proposal and pitch. Working with a project of your own design, you will build a small-scale but functioning digital humanities project—whether a dataset, map, visualization, digital edition, exhibit, or another form suited to your research question—that puts the methods and tools explored this semester into sustained practice.

Rationale for Assignment: Where the practicums offer brief, exploratory encounters with individual tools, the final project asks for hands-on, long-term work on a project of your own design. Carrying a single idea from proposal through data, method, and finished output is where the conceptual and technical threads of the course come together, and where you begin to see—concretely—how DH methods might shape your own scholarly research.

Submit to Box one week after your final presentation.