Final Group Project

For the final project, you will work in groups of three or four to explore a dataset with about 1000 to 4000 data points and turn your findings into a public history project, hosted on your own project websites. These datasets include, for example, Cigarette advertisements , Opioid prescription data , Experience reports from people who take drugs , or radio show transcripts.

Each project website needs to include:

• A narrative of about 2000 words that describes your research and findings
• At least five visualizations that explore clearly defined questions
• An “About” page that describes the sources, processing, and presentation that went into the project as well as your explanations for choices that you make. The “About” page should also include short bios of the team members and outline who work on what aspect of the project.
• An annotated bibliography of the literature and projects consulted
• A data critique that explains what information is included in your dataset and what questions it can and cannot answer.

Sample Projects

For inspiration, have a look at these student projects:

• [Re]activate Mama Pina's Cookbook
• The Nixon Tapes
• Project Chop Suey: Immigration and Cuisine in America's Chinatowns
• Cartographers of North Korea
• Many, many more digital humanities projects

Datasets

Here are datasets that you could consider working with:

• Reddit Corpora: This is a great site that gives you access to Reddit submissions in a very flexible way. For example, you could get comments from r/Drugs. Or you could get a sample of comments mentioning Fentanyl from 2015 through 2020 and compare them. Or you could get samples from different areas (r/Kentucky vs. r/Boston) and see what patterns you can identify.
  Mode of analysis: Primarily text, possibly geographic
• Erowid: We have already seen Visualizing Erowid. However, the rich user reports aggregated by Text Mining Altered States of Consciousness can yield many more insights.
  Mode of analysis: Text
• DEA Opioid Prescription Data Multiple options. e.g. map out where drugs are distributed by pharmacies in a county, potentially compare prescription rates to number of inhabitants in a town. (In essence, a version of this map. Geocoded pharmacy list available here.
  Mode of analysis: Mapping
• Cigarette Advertisments: This website collects thousands of cigarette advertisements organized by themes. Could be used for an online exhibit of a particular theme but also to generate, for example, "average" advertisements by decade.
  Mode of analysis: Images, online exhibits.

Acknowledgements

This class as a whole, but this final project in particular strongly draws--with permission--on the final assignment of Miriam Posner's fantastic DH 101 class.