Campers

In this session I propose a discussion of challenges and solutions that attendees have found for the initial steps of a digital humanities project: identifying collaborators, funding sources, tools, required skills, data sources, methods of data extraction and preparation. These considerations often take a back seat to the final display/dissemination of data analysis and the conclusions that arise from it, but they are essential to any project’s success. I would like to focus in particular on data extraction and preparation, since these steps often take a great deal of effort to implement, but documentation of these steps does not necessarily exist even when tools/code are publicly available, so that projects may unknowingly replicate work already done by others. Have you used unstructured textual data for a digital humanities project? What did you need to do to prepare it for analysis? What do you wish you had known before you started or along the way? What kinds of support did you find? OR Are you thinking about starting a new project? How do you anticipate finding and using your data? What kinds of documentation would be most useful to you?