Digital Humanities Start-up Grant Proposal: Draft
Here it is!
Project Proposal Draft
Appendix 1
I will have blog posts and comments etc. for everyone after I get some sleep, but I will say I’ve looked over several of the proposals already and thought they were really great, both in terms of the amazingly creative ideas everyone is coming up with and the in the way you all are presenting them. Also, I’m glad this week’s readings were…this week’s readings. I originally wasn’t planning on doing a user-driven project but something just clicked for me and I realized that with my topic I almost have to include a user-submission component in some way if I my site to be truly new and dynamic. The readings and example websites also made taking on such a task seem much less scary. Also, digital forensics are awesome. For me, I run into trouble with digital media when it becomes to math-like. Something about the digital forensics readings made this kind of technologically and the way I am interacting with it feel very esoteric in a way I hadn’t quite been able to access before intellectually. I found it to be really engaging. Anyway, more later!
Edit: I am also a 2!
Hi Claire!
Just to double check, you were a “2” as well, yes?
Yes! Sorry, I totally forgot to add my number to my blog.
Hi again!
First of all, I really like your ideas for the “Radical Feminist History Project.” This is a fascinating project, and I like the fact that the history being addressed is recent enough that oral histories can be collected, but far enough in the past that, I would hope, those involved feel able to discuss their experiences. I agree that such a project will be helpful for encouraging future scholarship on this movement.
First, to give you a sense of how I am reading your proposal, here is my general sense of your overall project. It seems that there are two goals to the project: the first being making primary materials available on the web, and the second being to create a community space for those involved in the Radical Feminist movement. It is upon these actors that you are dependent for the material and you seem to be positioning the archive as, in some ways, an extension of the movement it studies. This archive will both preserve the experiences of these involved in radical feminism, which will hopefully encourage more scholarship on the movements, and will serve a community-creating function for these actors.
Just a couple of questions as you work on the final draft. Some are nuts-and-bolts questions and others are more conceptual.
1. My first question involves copyright. While you can control the copyright status of the material submitted to the website, is the material currently in collections available to be freely disseminated on the web? I know some archives like to keep a tight lock on their materials and was wondering if that might affect your plan.
2. My second question relates to the experience of the outside user. You focus heavily in your proposal on how those submitting information would experience the website, as they are your primary resource for materials. What was less clear to me was the experience for the student or researcher. Will there be secondary essays to orient users to the content? How will users interact with the content?
3. Moving back to the experience of the contributors, you focus on the contribution of stories and artifacts as building on and extending the community of those involved in the movement. Have you thought about adding a discussion board or other interactive piece so that those contributing can communicate easily with each others? It seems that you may be able to encourage even more stories by allowing contributors to collaborate. Also, this would help your site serve the community building function you speak of in your proposal.
4. Related to this is a question about privacy. You note in the proposal that contributors can submit stories or items but mark them as private. What is the fate of these items? Would it be reasonable to have a limited period that they are “private”? I am curious, in general, about archives that are made inaccessible per the donors request and am wondering how private materials are helpful to the larger goals of the site.
5. My final comments relate to your work plan. This section seemed hard when I was creating mine because I have not executed such a project. However, a few things popped out that might be helpful.
a. Given that this is such a community driven project, it seems that it would be beneficial to start seeking contributors at the very beginning of the project. Developing those relationship will take time and it seems that contributions that are ready “too early” can be dealt with more easily than contributions too late.
b. Along a similar vein, you may want to start advertising much earlier as well. It might be interesting to include a blog about the project where you can discuss what you are doing and share some of the stories as they are contributed. Developing interest and users is a long process, and from what I know about startups, if you wait until you have a fully formed product, you’ve waited too long.
c. I am also curious about your first 3-month period. If you are using Omeka, it seems that you can get a skeleton site, at the very least, up and running quite quickly, as many of the features you mention are pre-existing plugins. This could free up quite a bit of time and money for creating community engagement and collecting submissions.
Hopefully these questions and thoughts are useful! I think it’s a great project and a great opportunity to combine both scholarship and community engagement. If there are particular areas that you would like feedback on that I’ve missed, just let me know!
If you are interested in material already in Archives, take a look at http://specialcollections.vassar.edu/findingaids/national_womens_political_caucus.html and other material – I could put you in touch with the Special Collections Head at VC, or the VC alumni network here in DC.
This is a great articulation of the archive and its place in the larger community. I’d like very much to get a sense of the significance for the project in the scholarly community. You can do that with some discussion of the main literature on second wave feminism, and by footnoting the statements that are already there. Linking your environmental scan to the project itself will help too. And, you should probably include the Sophia Smith Collection in that environmental scan. Finally, on the workplan and the dissemination…. the time frame seems a little short for the source gathering since you’ll also have to create the metadata. And, I’d like to see a little more specificity on the outreach plan — perhaps specific conferences and listservs.