Download PDF

To wrap up our unit on archival data, you should choose one digitized dataset and write an online exhibit that contextualizes, explains, and complicates it. This will likely be one of the two you have uploaded, although you can upload a third if you want.

Points, per the syllabus: 3

Your analysis should include:

  1. A description of the dataset, with its primary elements. You may need to refer to external items. Use a footnote and a hyperlink in Google Docs.

  2. A consideration of a major theme raised by your exhibit. This theme should be clearly stated in the first paragraph of the piece.

    What you choose as a theme is up to you, but some to consider are:

    1. What kinds of access where enabled, practiced, or developed through paper technologies?
    2. What is it ethical to digitize and share?
    3. What sorts of things are lost in digitization
    4. Who created past digital artifacts, and why? How much can we know about them?
    5. What sort of paper datasets have been saved, and what haven’t?

    You should include in this a reference to at least one reading from class this semester, and a reference to a different digitized artifact from class, preferably by another student.

  3. A description of a digitization plan that brings it into a modern data form. How long would this take? How much has already been done? What kinds of visualizations, interfaces, and so on would a visualization enable?

Your audience is The Internet. The people who are likely to stumble across this are 1. Me 2. Your fellow students, now and in later iterations of this class 3. Some of the archivists and librarians who shared suggestions with us.

Submission

Submission is by addition to the Google Drive folder by 5pm on Wednesday, Nov. 10. We will spend time in class on Nov 11 doing a review of the site and noting problems; revisions (which should be technical) are due Tuesday, Nov 14. by 5pm.