Fundamentals of Project Design

Project design encompasses all the decisions you’ll make in order to bring your project to fruition. Because this can be a daunting and overwhelming process, we’ve broken it down into 5 steps with questions to ask yourself at each. Designing a digital humanities project involving spatial visualization requires (1) articulating your objectives, (2) identifying constraints, (3) determining an output, (4) assembling resources, and (5) considering project maintenance and preservation. These five steps are nonlinear, and you will likely iterate through them multiple times.

As you reflect on the following questions, it can be useful to write down your answers to refer to later. A Project Design Worksheet has been prepared for you as a Microsoft Word document as well as Rich Text Document in the dhsi-workshop/Day1 folder. You can also view it as a Google Doc here, but please make a copy of it to your own Drive to work on. This worksheet is for your own benefit, and will not be collected or assessed by the facilitators. You will also have a chance to think through these questions during the workshop, though it may be helpful to review them beforehand.

Now, let’s go through each step, asking some basic questions to articulate your objectives, constraints, and resources. This, in turn, will help you decide on an output format and tools to make it happen. Fill in what you know now, and add to it throughout the week. Remember, this is an iterative processes, and depending on where you are in your project ideation, you may have a clearer or more vague picture of what you want to make. Hopefully, as you are introduced to the variety of tools we’ll share, the kind of tools and output you will use will become clearer.

1. Articulating Objectives

The first question to ask yourself is: What are my overarching project objectives?

What are you trying to show spatially? For example, are you trying to show change over time? A voyage, itinerary, or historical timeline? The geographic location of a city, country, or research area in and of itself or in comparison to another region? The density or dispersal of an attribute across different locales? Describe in as much detail: e.g., I want to show historical tramlines in Montreal, color coded by decade.
Does your spatial visualization deal with your entire project or a portion of it? Is it illustrative or will I use it as the basis for some sort of analysis? How does the spatial visualization contribute to your project as a whole?

2. Identifying Constraints

Constraints, such as those around time and resources, limit what you can do. However, identifying your constraints before beginning a project enables you to explore within reason, taking on only as much as you can handle. Below are some questions to get you thinking about what constraints you may be working within.

What is your timeframe? Is there an expected timeline for your progress, e.g., specific deadlines for various stages of your project output? To whom are you accountable?
Are you working alone or within a team? If working with others, it can be helpful to identify who is responsible for what, how material will be shared, and at what stages feedback will be given and incorporated. If it is a collaborative project, this will also impact what tools/software you can use (ie. ArcGIS online requires all collaborators to have the same license)
Is your visualization for your own research, or are there client or publication specifications you must take into consideration (dissertation requirements, publisher guidelines for articles etc.)?
What skills do you have that are relevant to the project you are undertaking? Do you have time/interest/capacity to learn new skills? Reflecting on just how much energy you can put into the project at hand will guide you in choosing what tools/platforms to use in constructing your spatial visualizations.

3. Determining Output

Determining the format of your output will enable you to assess and assemble the necessary resources. If you already have an idea of the output you want, take a moment to sketch it out or describe it with words. Otherwise, reflect on the following questions:

Who is your audience? Who is your spatial visualization for? To whom should it be legible?
How do you want your audience to interact/engage with your story? Will it be a stand-alone graphic or integrated somehow in a publication or website? Thinking back to your objectives, is the purpose of your story to provide contextual spatial reference, convey a narrative, or visualize the results of some analysis?
Do you want your output to be a static map, or something more dynamic and interactive hosted on the web? Do you want others to be able to manipulate your data or engage with it?
It can be helpful in this stage to gather some examples that approximate your desired output. From where do you draw inspiration?

4. Assembling Resources

After you have a sense of your objectives, constraints, and intended output format, you can begin inventorying your data and assembling additional resources that suit your project’s goals. Questions to ask yourself at this stage include:

What data do you have? What data do you need? Do you have proper attribution information for the data you might be using from elsewhere?
What aspect of your data is spatial? Do you have to manipulate your data to add a spatial component (for instance, adding coordinates or geocoding)?
What format is your data in (e.g. csv, text, image, geospatial file, historical map, list of names or places, etc.…)? Is your data in current format legible to the software you intend to use? Do you need to convert any of it into a different format?
How are you managing and storing your data? Will you, and everyone who needs it, have access to the data and software for the duration of this project? Are you required to share your data openly (a requirement from some grants now, like the Tri-Agency grants in Canada)?
What software, tools, platforms do you have access to or capacity to use? Gather the relevant tools/methods/platforms for your spatial story and begin mapping!

5. Project Maintenance and Preservation

If your project is web-based or interactive, it will likely need maintenance to stay up to date with changing systems or data sources. Questions to ask yourself at the start of your project include:

Is this a one-off spatial visualization like a static map for publication? Think about how you will save both the source data and the visualization and keep backups. Consider how and where you will archive the material.
Are you relying on data or basemaps from a provider or through an API call/link/etc.? Consider how you will ensure you can continue to access this data and what plan you will have for data/link checking long-term.
Are you creating an interactive spatial visualization like a webmap or StoryMap? Ensure that you will have ongoing access to be able to update the spatial visualization project.
Interactive projects can be trickier to archive and/or preserve. Consider how you might want to preserve the experience (screenshots, individual elements saved, etc.).
Do you have an institutional subscriptions/access to any platforms or software you are using? Might you change institutions or positions? Projects like StoryMaps can be tricky to switch between institutional accounts, or from an institutional account to a free license, so consider long-term access to softwares/platforms as well before starting your project. Consider open source options you might use.