Up, Down, Lateral Project Scoping

Working with humanists to scope a project can be challenging. Every idea feels precious, and it can sometimes feel as if changing anything at all is somehow a personal attack on what you’re trying to do rather than a good faith effort to help a project come to fruition. Here’s a quick exercise to help students learn how to navigate this process. The activity invites students to push and pull a single project idea in many different directions. I call it “Up, Down, Lateral Project Scoping.”

The main thing you’ll need is an idea that feels neutral in some way, something of vague interest but to which students won’t feel especially attached. As a frame for the work, I tell students that any project can be brown down into a formula:

• object of study + method = project

This definition is, of course, made up, incomplete, and inadequate. But it still gives some lines in the sand that we will use for the exercise. Any parameter can be changed to affect the nature of the work. You can also make a project bigger or smaller, more ambitious or more tightly doable.

To begin the activity, put your neutral topic on the board on a whiteboard. Discuss the idea for a few minutes to develop some small project for it. Then, at various times, a facilitator calls out “up,” “down,” or “lateral” to indicate a new direction that the group must take the project idea in. Up or down shifts are fairly self-explanatory: practice making the project bigger or smaller and then discussing what such a change would look like. Lateral shifts ask students to practice orbiting around an idea, substituting in a change in method or object of study but keeping the same general area of concern. Lateral shifts are an invitation for students to see the different kinds of projects that can emerge if you keep many other things the same but move sideways. Think of these shifts as in the same genre as the faculty member who comes in asking for help with mapping, but you find yourself pointing out that mapping is a metaphor for them—they are really talking about network analysis, and pointing this out suddenly makes everything fall into place. Making sideways changes can often help others find out what a project is really about.

When I ran this exercise with the Praxis students this past week, the cohort brought in a variety of different interests that they all shared. I picked “recipes” from that list because the idea felt safe, of some interest but not a deep passion for anyone in the room. After framing the activity with the above context, we discussed the topic for a bit and came up with a small project: we took the interest in recipes and developed a project on local food pantries, what kinds of food was actually available at them, and what recipes they do or don’t enable. I then shifted the conversation by saying “Okay. Make it smaller.” The conversation moved to how we could study how people use one particular food pantry in particular. “Smaller again.” Instead of the whole food pantry, we might look at just the vegetarian options made available by that organization. “Now make it bigger.” Maybe we’re going to compare this food pantry to many different pantries in Virginia. “Bigger again.” Now we’re going to provide all these different food pantries with a form where they can collect information from their users about their needs whenever they walk in the door. All of these shifts bring with them new problems and opportunities that were fuel for discussion.

Bigger or smaller are shifts that make sense for students. Lateral movements are more challenging and take more prodding. I often found myself saying, “Okay. Now let’s shift laterally by changing the method to X.” Or “how would this project look different if we keep the same method but change the object of study to Y?” When I called out one lateral shift, for example, I asked students to think about a different kind of project on food had some of the same goals in mind. “Instead of food pantries, what would a project like this look like if we focused on other places where people engage with food?” The students came up with recipe blogs, which brought out some good conversation about how you could study food and diet practices on the web. Another lateral shift—”You’ve mostly focused on the ingredients list. What other kinds of materials are on recipe blogs? Other kinds of things you might study?” These questions led the students to discuss how we might examine the narrative introductions on many food blogs as text analysis materials. Maybe we’re looking at how long or short the particular narratives are to see if there’s some corollary with diet or cuisine. A lateral shift again—”what about other kinds of data sources are available on the website?” We discussed how you might analyze photographic habits on amateur food websites. “Smaller.” Focus on one recipe, one particular type of cuisine, or one particular type of food blogger. “Lateral shift again.” Maybe instead of the actual content on the website, you could make a mapping project where you see if recipe bloggers tend to write in or about particular places.

The goal was ultimately to teach that a project is not any one thing. Any one idea can be modified in a thousand small ways to respect your core interest but make it more doable. By asking students to respond quickly and move a project in a particular direction, they practice skills they can take back to their own work.

Something not working? Try moving it around to look at it a different way.