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Sunday, 23-Apr-2023 23:31:31 UTC. Maintained by: Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar
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Guidelines for Digital Humanities Course Projects
The main goals for your course projects are to identify, investigate, and discuss
a research question that you are addressing using digital methods based
on XML markup and analysis, and to share that research by means of a project site
designed for the World Wide Web, a site that can be readily transferred to a new
server environment and to work across platforms and browsers. To meet these goals,we
expect your course projects to meet the following standards for lasting and
sustainable digital humanities work:
-
Organize your site carefully:
- Your site should consist of multiple pages, and hold a site menu that
clearly and effectively guides readers.
- You need a title for your project to use at least on the main site
page.
- Your main page should be named index.html, and
needs to describe what site visitors will learn from exploring this
site.
- Use the <head> . . . </head>
element in HTML effectively to hold each page's distinct title (to view
in tabbed browsers), and give each page a clear title in the appropriate
heading elements (h1, h2, h3, etc) in HTML.
- Apply relative links to files on your site, and be sure your web directory is well
organized so that your code functions (no broken links or mistargeted file associations).
For a complicated site it may be helpful to organize your work in subdirectories,
so your HTML files are all in your root directory (together with index.html). It is
up to you to decide whether to hold your images and script files (CSS, JavaScript)
in their own internal directories.
- Your site should include a page inviting visitors (especially those interested in
learning and applying your code) to view and study the forms of code you have been
writing behind the scenes. Your Relax-NG or Schematron schema files, for example, would be especially
useful to feature as they help show some of your significant coding decisions (and
may be worth discussing on your site in relation to your research question). Sample
XSLT files and XQuery scripts are helpful too. One of your most important audiences
for your site will be other students learning to code, and you can help light the
way for your peers by providing examples of your work. Load these files onto your
site and write relative links to them to feature on your page reviewing your coding
work. If you have used a GitHub repository your links could lead to your public-facing
GitHub files. (Be sure all your links are functional!) All of the coding you have
completed to develop this project should be featured in some way from your project
website.
-
If you provide a reading view of texts you have marked up, remember that your
project needs to present something more than an edition of the texts:
- Your project needs to be optimized to explore a research question, so
your presentation of texts needs to be part of that investigation. Where
you present your texts, find a way to do so that addresses your research
question and brings out something about the texts that we could not find
in other available reading views.
- You need to explain in your site what readers can find in your reading
view: What have you prepared, and what features are you inviting us to
explore?
-
Your research analysis and conclusions need to be clearly readable and discussed
on your site.
- We expect you to use graphs, charts, and maps, or some other form of
efficient and well organized visualization. Graphs and charts need
clear titles and labels, as well as discussion.
- Do not leave your visualizations to speak for themselves, but provide discussion of
your findings: What do the results show us for certain? What is not so certain? What
next steps might be taken to continue this work?
- Write up your conclusions for a non-technical audience (that is, an audience of people
who are interested in your field and research question, but who do not necessarily
understand the specialized digital methods you have been using). Where you use unusual
terms or specialized jargon, be sure to provide definitions and links to resources
for further information.
- Cite your sources for images and material that you use that did not originate with you and your project team. Where appropriate, provide direct links to the main pages of these resources.
Where these materials have been necessary for your project, citation may involve more than simply listing bibliography entries,
but may involve writing sentences and paragraphs describing your work with these resources. Possible methods include making the image itself (or its container) a live link
to the source site, putting the URL for the source site in the
@title attribute of the image or its container element, or including the URL as readable
text on the page.
-
Your project must meet the following W3C standards for web design:
- Each HTML page needs a doctype declaration and a namespace declaration. To add these
where you need them, create a new HTML (XHTML 5) document in <oXygen/> and copy and paste the declarations
in your HTML. (We do not recommend keeping the xml line at the very top, but just the DOCTYPE and the root html element pointing to the xhtml namespace.
We also add two
meta elements, the first mainly to establish the character set is UTF-8, and the second to encourage responsiveness of the page to mobile viewers.
Our house style and the practice preferred by the Worldwide Web Consortium is to attach a separately linked CSS stylesheet and minimize inline CSS to separate styling from semantic content.
A model of our preferred code is here:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="yourCSS.css" />
</head>
<body>
...
</body>
</html>
Where you are writing XSLT to produce HTML, include the appropriate
HTML namespace. For XHTML in the form of HTML 5, here are the codes to use to control the namespace and DOCTYPE definitions: (http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml) in the <xsl:stylesheet> root element at the top, as well as in the xsl:output line:
<xsl:output method="xhtml" html-version="5" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>
- Your pages each need to be valid as HTML 5. You can check
your page validity in <oXygen/> or through the W3 Consortiums's Markup Validation Service.
-
Other Web Project Requirements
- Your project must include a Creative Commons License Statement, at least on the main page, or in a small-type footer on each page as you wish. The
choice of license is up to you, but read about why web projects licensing and choose
a license at the Creative Commons site.
- Unless there is a good reason that you have cleared with us ahead of time, all CSS
and JavaScript must be in separate files, not inline on HTML elements.
- You may not use JavaScript libraries (such as JQuery) for your course project, though
it is acceptable to copy and adapt individual functions from other sites. Cite your
source as a comment inside your .js (JavaScript) file when you do that: include the
URL of your source site inside comment tags so you and other visitors who are learning
code from your site can follow your trail. (Citing adaptations of code is one of the
reasons to use and follow Creative Commons licensing.)
- Your pages need to work in all major browsers: the most recent versions of Internet
Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on Windows 7 or 8 or later, and the most recent
versions of Safari, Chrome, or Firefox on MacOS 10.9 (Mavericks) or later. We do not
require support for mobile devices simply because these do not have mouse interfaces
to support JavaScript mouse events. However, we encourage you to try testing and optimizing
your sites for mobile reading.
- You are developing your pages on public-facing webspace (from your GitHub project repos and affiliated wtih our course and project development domain https://newtfire.org) under the aegis of the DIGIT program.
Your work in this course and the final course project fulfills a prescribed major requirement in our DIGIT major or the Digital Humanities Minor at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. You should represent and link to all of these entities, together with your GitHub repo, somewhere on your project pages.
Be aware that your work is available in public space and may be discovered and cited by others (which should be good for you)! Be sure to maintain clear communication with your instructors to transfer your files,
so that we can help you with testing site functionality and to help review your site content with you as you are working to complete a semester's work on your projects.
- To submit or turn in your project by the deadline (Thursday of Finals Week by 11:59 PM), complete your project websiteand write to us with a link to the site.
- At least one member of the project team is responsible for communicating with the instructors that the project is ready for
us to view and evaluate.
- Each member of the project team must write a private e-mail message to the instructors (due by the project deadline)
to describe what work you have contributed to the project and to evaluate the work
done by your other team members. Your message should describe the contributions and
responsibilities of each team member and comment on whether and how successfully these
were fulfilled, in order for the instructors to fairly evaluate and issue project
grades to the individual team participants.
- Each of you pursuing the DIGIT major must link to your course project (and may link to other work you wish to feature) from this class on a website you develop as your online portfolio featuring your digital projects.
This will eventually be reviewed by the DIGIT faculty to ensure completion of our portfolio requirements for the major, and we hope will be useful for you in pursuing careers and graduate programs.
Portfolios may be developed on your personal space in NewtFire, your Penn State personal webspace, or elsewhere as you wish, but must meet our minimal standards as posted in our Portfolio Standards page.
- Some student projects will be in active development over multiple semesters with new students joining to continue the work of previous semesters.
It is important that all students involved in a project and the semester of their involvement be documented on your project site.
