NEH Institute materials

Reflecting upon & planning projects

Chelcie Juliet Rowell • Monday, July 11, 2022 • Advanced Digital Editing: Modeling the Text & Making the Edition • NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities

Project management reflections

We’ve learned about project proposals and project charters (also known as project plans) as structures that help you to identify the intermediate steps of pursuing your research questions, as well as collaborative processes when working on a project team whose members have a wide range of experiences, perspectives, and expertise. We’ve paid particular attention to some components that are commonly part of projects proposals and/or project plans:

• research questions, research goals, and edition goals
• audience…and their goals
• what’s in scope, and also—crucially—what’s out of scope
• project team expertise, roles, and responsibilities
• communication norms
• sustainability
• project tasks and schedule

Now let’s reflect on what we’ve learned:

1. What aspects of project management do you find most intuitive and/or most likely to be helpful for your digital edition project?
2. What aspects of project management do you find most counterintuitive and/or least likely to be helpful for your digital edition project?
3. What questions about project management do you still have?

Planning our own projects

A note about sketching

One aspect of the project plan that we haven’t yet learned about together is wireframing—though I prefer the word ‘sketching’ because it feels more humanistic somehow! Much of the text in this ‘note about sketching’ comes from an assignment in a course taught by Ryan Shaw that I took when I was in my master’s program. Ryan in turn drew heavily on a syllabus by Melandie Feinberg. I have since used this assignment as the foundation of in-class activities for small digital projects in courses where I’m a guest instructor, such as guiding biomedical engineers through designing a static website for a medical device they design in their senior year. In their case, they are not designing a user interface from scratch, but their sketches serve as a requirements analysis for selecting a Jekyll theme for their website.

So, for designers, initial sketches function as low-effort idea generators. The goal is to give an idea enough structure to see what it reveals about the design situation and to invite comment, from yourself, your collaborators, and your project’s potential users. Most of the literature on sketching comes from product design and architecture, but information architects and user interface designers also sketch. Web site maps and wireframes show structural components in schematic form and are a form of sketch. At the beginning of a project, these representations are rough and tenuous, ready to be changed or scrapped. As the project continues and the design begins to solidify, the sketches become more detailed and represent the results of one’s various design decisions. At first, your sketches should truly be just sketches: loose, disposable, and multiple. Later, your sketches will be more detailed: coherent and consistent, and showing enough to clarify what your finished website would look like. Today we will sketch using paper and pencil. Later in the process of developing your edition, you will be ‘sketching in software.’

Shaw, Ryan. “Sketching assignment.” University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science, INLS 890: Making the Humanities Digital, Fall 2012.

Let’s look together at some of Gabi Keane’s wireframes for the pr-app sample edition.

Sketching your digital edition

Tomorrow (Friday) you will have the opportunity to present a 5-minute presentation about your digital edition, during Friday’s concluding session facilitated by Elli Bleeker. A potential topic for your presentation is user interface design, and a suggested means of your presentation is your wireframes (created using pen and paper, presented by taking a picture). So carrying out this exercise is also, potentially, preparation for your presentation tomorrow. As you complete this exercise, you may wish to draw upon the list of exemplary digital editions that Elli put together for inspiration.

Round 1

1. Sketch 2–3 possible versions of the home page of your digital edition. What are the design elements and organization?
2. Compare sketches. What design choices are similar? What choices are different? Which might better serve your research goals and edition goals? Which might better serve your primary intended audiences?

Round 2

1. Sketch 2–3 possible versions of another page type within your digital edition, for example:

   • search results page
   • page listing a particular type of named entity
   • item page for a named entity
   • item page for a document
   • particular type of visualization
   • etc.

2. Once again, compare sketches. What design choices are similar? What choices are different? Which might better serve your research goals and edition goals? Which might better serve your primary intended audiences?