Challenges faced.
Like many Digital Humanities project, some of the challenges our group faced was coming up with project ideas that best incorporate the data that was generously shared with us. But in order to come up with the ideas, we had to comprehend the data and that in itself is a challenge. The key fields are not entirely self-explanatory making it difficult to understand and thus quite impossible to analyze. In addition to the ambiguous key field, a majority of the field types are strings with unstructured values thus making it hard to make any statistical analysis. Our team thought long and hard about what to do with the data to bring it to life and one way in doing so is through visualizations. Despite having amazing visualisation ideas, another challenge in the process of our project is to identify softwares or tools that can produce our visualizations along with evaluating our teams human capacity to expedite the process within the time frame. Although, there were many challenges along the way, it has been a rewarding experience.
There have been many challenges as mentioned above but with each one comes with new ideas for a solution. In regards to the ambiguous key field, we got the opportunity to speak with the data’s author himself, Dan Lewis, to clarify any questions that we had and also gave advice and ideas on how to approach this project. It was great speaking with Dr. Lewis. As for the unstructured string values, one approach we concluded is to do the manual labor ourselves and parsed through the data and create our own database. By this time, we had already decided what type of project we wanted and thus parsed the necessary data, which is the key field “provenance notes”. Once this was accomplished, we had discussed possible tools that we each had experienced with and use that to our advantage for this project. Thankfully, we had an amazing project mentor, Miriam Posner, who I might add is a Digital Humanities expert, assist us with this task. We couldn’t have asked for a better mentor. Our challenges had opened us to learning opportunities with amazing people and we couldn’t have asked for a better experience.
There have been many challenges as mentioned above but with each one comes with new ideas for a solution. In regards to the ambiguous key field, we got the opportunity to speak with the data’s author himself, Dan Lewis, to clarify any questions that we had and also gave advice and ideas on how to approach this project. It was great speaking with Dr. Lewis. As for the unstructured string values, one approach we concluded is to do the manual labor ourselves and parsed through the data and create our own database. By this time, we had already decided what type of project we wanted and thus parsed the necessary data, which is the key field “provenance notes”. Once this was accomplished, we had discussed possible tools that we each had experienced with and use that to our advantage for this project. Thankfully, we had an amazing project mentor, Miriam Posner, who I might add is a Digital Humanities expert, assist us with this task. We couldn’t have asked for a better mentor. Our challenges had opened us to learning opportunities with amazing people and we couldn’t have asked for a better experience.
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