We are going to work out the process for designing your digital research project in this session. Good—or shall we say effective—projects begin with a plan. It's true those plans may change over the life cycle of the project. Your questions may change. Your funding may change. Even the shape your "final" research project takes may change.
What separates projects that turn into something from those that stall out and go nowhere is the formulation of a reasonable, informed, and purposeful plan.
Most workshops teach you something: a skill, a method, a practice. But what are you going to do next? Sure you've learned how to start to use Python. You might have done some natural language processing or written your first webpage, but the real trick is figuring out how to take what you've learned, plan for what comes next, and make your project come to fruition.
None of those things can happen without a plan. If you walk out those doors today without a plan for what your next steps will be, it's unlikely that you'll be able to make much progress. There is no possible way for us to teach you everything you need to know, and there's no way for you to learn anything well enough in one week that you can walk out those doors and do everything you want to do.
In this workshop, you will learn the following skills:
- Identify existing resources (and maybe even a few you haven't thought of yet)
- Identify your needs
- Create a workplan
- Find new resources
- Communicate your plan
Begin with the end in mind
Identify key audiences, constituencies, and collaborators
Environmental scan
Resource assessment
Outreach
Work Plans: Scoping and Scheduling
Sustainability and Data Management
Effective Partnerships
Finding Funding
Draft Project Proposal
Presentation Slide
Session Leader: Lisa Rhody
Based on previous work by Lisa Rhody and a WebWise workshop led by Sheila Brennan, Sharon Leon, and Lisa Rhody.
Digital Research Institute (DRI) Curriculum by Graduate Center Digital Initiatives is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://github.com/DHRI-Curriculum. When sharing this material or derivative works, preserve this paragraph, changing only the title of the derivative work, or provide comparable attribution.