Evaluating Digital Humanities Projects: Collaborative Course Assessment

For your Partnered #DH project Critique essay, you were asked to use Shannon Mattern’s criteria for evaluating Multimodal Student Work and the peer review criteria from Galey & Ruecker’s “How a Prototype Argues”, (2010) to evaluate selected digital humanities projects. This is an important exercise, especially to those new to #dh, as it helps you think about what does and doesn’t work, about the usefulness of various genres of projects, and about how current projects might be altered to become more useful, more user-friendly, and/or more academically rigorous. As we critique existing projects, we come to a better grasp of how we might develop and manifest our own projects. An important next gesture, then, is for us to establish assessment (read: grading) criteria for our own final transmedia projects. We’ll start where we’ve already started: we’ll look at Mattern’s comprehensive criteria and chose those that best suit our needs. Then we’ll add more, delete the unnecessaries, and edit those we want to tweak.

Here I’ve posted my annotated copy of her list. These criteria are now posted on Rap Genius. Your assignment, to be completed within the next two weeks, is to add at least four annotations to that Rap Genius page expressing your ideas and opinions about these criteria. You can add criteria or vote for a deletion. You can suggest edits or request justification for why I’ve highlighted certain sections. The criteria I feel most important to our project are highlighted and annotated below. I welcome all comments. Go!

Gould Annotations – Click and Zoom to read

Gould annotations page 2

Gould annotations page 3

To these, let’s add:

A consideration of Digital Preservation: Let’s think about how we might best preserve our content as a whole. And let’s consider best practices for saving our own personal work. Remember, it is always best to write your webcontent using a saveable (and backup-able) document source, like Word or Google Docs, that you can save, store, and archive. Should our site go down or become compromised, you’ll want to have a backup copy of your hard work. Make sure you download a copy of your media element if possible and/or store an extra copy in the cloud. Let’s think too about zombie links and dead sites.

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