Assignments
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Intro to Networks I
Due: Thursday February 28
After you complete the slides above, post a short (approx 300-500 words) post answering the following questions from the slides:
How does the network change over time as you add more years? Who are the major connectors who bring small sub-networks into connection?
How does the network compared by betweenness centrality compare to the network sized by degree? How do the large nodes sized by betweenness compare to the people who connected subnetworks when we filtered by year? Are they the same people?
How do the patterns formed by clustering compare with the individuals who have high betweenness centrality? How do they compare with the small networks that formed and connected when we filtered by year?
You may optionally complete this assignment in teams of two. If you do, each team member must fill out the team assignment evaluation.
Update 2/27: If the website hangs on clustering, you can see the clusters here.
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Intro to Twine
More programming! If you run into trouble, ask in our #twine Slack channel, or bounce around ideas for your story draft. Your story can be as fictional or non-fictional as you like, but it should reference our early 19th century Albany newspapers:
If you’re not sure about ideas, read the advertisements and think about what it would be like to walk through town, or make a non-fiction timeline of how events of the War of 1812 were experienced in Albany.
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Visualization Guide
Due: Thursday February 21
Undergrad: Approx 500 words total, 2 types per person
Grad: Approx 1000 words total, 2 types per person
Visualization guide posts should be aimed at an audience of historians, and should aim to give a basic understanding of what each visualization is useful for to someone who understands basic line/bar/pie charts.
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Intro to Data Cleaning
Due: Tuesday February 26
This is a long lesson and pretty hard, so settle in with a snack and join the #datacleaning channel on our Slack.
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Project Review Assignment
Due: Tuesday February 5
Undergrad: Approx. 300-500 words each (1 post per person)
Grad: Approx. 500-750 words each (2 posts per person)
Project critiques should be addressed to an audience of historians, not digital specialists. Think of it as a book review of a digital project. The Journal of American History has guidelines for reviewing the three most common types of digital projects:
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Infographic Assignment
Due: Thursday February 28
Using Piktochart or Infogram, create an infographic based on a historical Wikipedia article of your choice. See this Pinterest board for some examples of history infographics. Your team should identify interesting or important numbers, people, locations, quotes, or other information to highlight. The purpose of this assignment is to visually summarize a scholarly argument. You should use as little text as possible while communicating a unified idea or argument as clearly as possible.
Your team’s infographic must:
- Have at least three distinct blocks of information
- Include a combination of words, images, graphics, and numbers
- Use fonts in 3 hierarchical levels to denote importance
- Include a linked citation to the article your infographic is based on
- The post must be tagged with your team’s name and the name of your Wikipedia article
Post your infographic to the course blog using the “Infographics” category. Include the image file of your infographic as the featured image. In the post itself, reflect on why you selected particular images, facts, or numbers to contextualize your article’s topic or argument. What choices did you make to draw attention to the most important information? Was there anything you wanted to include but couldn’t, because of space, lack of information, technical constraints, or your own skills?
Adapted from Bill Wolff’s Infographic Assignment
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Data Critique Assignment
Due: Tuesday February 12
Approx. 500 words.
Select one sample data set. You may optionally complete this assignment in a team of two.
Your post should explain what information is in your dataset, what kind of events, people, or phenomena your dataset describes, and what it cannot describe. You might use databasic.io or a spreadsheet filter to get an idea of what kind of data you’re working with. What is the scope of your data temporally, geographically, in number of records, or in other dimensions?
As best you’re able to determine, you should also describe how the data was generated, what the original sources were, how the data was collected, and how your data is divided. What is an individual record row? How is the data divided into columns and why? If this dataset were your only source, what kind of information would be left out?
Your team should complete this assignment by creating a post in the “Data Critiques” category. If you complete this assignment as a team, each team member needs to do a team assignment evaluation.
Adapted from Miriam Posner’s Data Critique.
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Introductions
Comment in the course Slack #introductions channel introducing yourself to the course, responding to the questions below.
