A note on ending projects
Four main ways to end a project (from my experience in industry)
- post mortem
- common pain points: collaboration breakdown, resource limitations
- retrospective
- white paper
- abandon it because your budget got reallocated, return to it some day or never
- abandon it because of other organizational change, never speak of it again
What was successful about this project?
Achievement 1: Research questions
- I do feel my edition meaningfully addresses the stated research questions and goals, as both a research tool and a pedagogical tool.
- Interface as research product
- functions as a research and discovery tool for (imagined) readers my UG thesis
Achievement 2: Learn something
- See “What I would do differently” for lessons
- A great way to learn more about databases, XQuery, programming paradigms, Javascript libraries, namespaces, XPath, faceted searching, etc
- I didn’t know how to build a digital edition when I started
Achievement 3: Laboratory edition framework
- We drew inspiration from Punch, an eXist-db application used in a 2010 TEI@Oxford and Digital.Humanities@Oxford Summer School 2011 by Joe Wicentowski.
- Punch is no longer being maintained and newer releases of eXist are breaking for it, but the framework and code were very helpful, especially in my early stages of edition building.
- We expand on this idea by using a real research project for the laboratory edition, so that questions and decisions about the research are central to writing the code and constructing the architecture.
Achievement 4: Project management
- A skill I’m still learning, but we did meet deadlines! Our stakeholders were pleased.
- How to evaluate the success of a project overall
What I would do differently
Choice 1: Exclude images
- Copyright reasons
- Research resources
- Time investment
Choice 2: Encoding choices
- This was the first TEI project I undertook. It shows!
- Data is less consistent
- Model building was often challenging
- Schemas are doing heavy lifting, I wish I’d put energy into creating schemas early
- ODD is complete, but only in proof-of-concept form.
Choice 3: Using my personal research for a laboratory edition
- I wouldn’t make a different choice, but I might make the choice differently
- I’ve had three years to reflect and work on this…and I’m tired of working on this!
- The content of the institute has been challenging and rewarding in its own ways
Choice 4: Scope definitions
- Defined scope in thesis significantly too broadly
- Ignored my own material limitations, repeatedly
- pr-app’s final state is what I’d hoped to finish in two semesters(?!)
Choice 5: Having a job
- Less of a choice and more of an ongoing burden…
- I’ve heard from many of you about this being a limitation for you within your academic job
- What do I find genuinely rewarding? I thought it was this, but it’s this AND many other wonderful things.
- I keep learning and forgetting this lesson when I am interested in a project
Choice 6: Delegate more
- Often I would say “No! I should be the one to do that!” while developing the app.
What I could do next
Choice 1: Move on
- I do not want to work on ghost stories any more
- I do want to work on more digital editions projects
- I have learned some valuable information about how to pick a dissertation project in the future
Choice 2: Enhance features
- We talked about linking on the maps, improvements to visualization, enhancing the reading view
- Add some relevant images and CSS to enhance user experience
Choice 3: Sustainability
- I will not sustain the research aspect of this project beyond 3 years
- GitHub repos for this institute will remain available and will include guide writing, as they are part of the NEH-funded institute materials
What are your successes?
- Revisit the goals you set at the beginning of this week and evaluate your progress.
- I want to understand…
- I want to do…
- I want to explain…