Starting to think about the Data Management Plan was somewhat challenging because it really forced our team to think a lot more about the project as a whole. We all realize that the data we will be using and the way we organize will go hand in hand with our final project deliverable. So we needed to stretch our minds in terms of thinking deeply about how to structure our data in order to facilitate the next phases in the project. And of course thinking about the types of data we will be generating and in what format it should be stored is a good way to also think about our code structure and how each component in the final website will look like.
During the past two weeks, I felt like the final product took better shape in my mind and I felt like finally everyone in the team was on the same page as to what we were trying to achieve. This was a breakthrough moment because it allowed us to modularize the project and think about what type of data each module will be using. We have decided on three main visual component: a map, a horizontal and a vertical timeline. By finalizing this decision, we were able to organize our spreadsheets into very specific columns that would facilitate a unified approach to research and data storage. We had to keep in mind that the research and data collection was going to be done by all five of us, which meant we needed a system that all of us understood and were able to follow so our data is as clean and comprehensible as possible.
Lisa’s idea of using Wikimedia commons as a way to keep the photos and videos we produce added a layer of organization that allowed for more granularity of data collection (citations, links, longitudes and latitude data..).
Overall, creating the Data Management Plan propelled us into a clear and unanimous understanding of what we are aiming to achieve as a group and it helped us get started on our code.
[This entry was originally posted on DHUM 70002 Digital Humanities: Methods and Practices (Spring 2021) in Personal Blogs on March 10, 2021 by NedjaEM.]
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
