Week 8 - Project Planning

  • 2025-03-04
  • 9:30-10:45
  • Shannon 317

Guiding Questions

  • What will you work on for the remainder of the course?

Pre-work

  • Come prepared to present two potential final data sources for your final project. You’ll be sharing them for a panel of judges to discuss as a group.
  • Answer these questions in your presentations:
    • What is the dataset? Why do we care?
    • How viable does it seem to collect the data? to clean it?
    • What questions might someone answer with the dataset that can’t otherwise be answered?
    • Are there any concerns about doing this work on this data, ethical or legal?
    • What are the pro’s and cons of each data source?
    • Which stories are you most interested in?

Plan

  • Student groups will pitch two potential ideas in groups to a panel of judges. 10 minutes max for each group followed by five minutes of Q&A.

  • Group 1 - cooking
  • Group 2 - libraries and museums
  • Group 3 - games
  • Group 4 - politics and economics

Homework

  • Submit a short write-up of your group’s ideas by Friday at 9:00AM. 1-2 single-spaced pages max. Rank the two pages based on your interest and how feasible they seem. If you have decided as a group on which is best, great. Otherwise Brandon will pick for you if you ask him to do so.

Final Project Description

Follow the steps of the course units to create a dataset and accompanying narrative. The outcome will look similar to the datasets shared on the Post45 Data Collective and Responsible Datasets in Context. Your final product should include:

  • Collected, cleaned data
  • Metadata breakdown
  • Narrative of the dataset
  • Usage examples, suggestions, and questions it raises
  • Basic analysis
  • Credits
  • Licensing information

The resulting work will probably be around 5-7 pages altogether, and you have milestones to hit along the way to get you there.

Information for Judges

You will be observing four different group presentations. Each group has been told they will get about 15 minutes, with 10 minutes for the presentation and 5 minutes for responses from you all. They will be presenting two project ideas each. See above for context about the final project as well as these presentations. My hope is that you will help provide feedback to shape the ideas into workable and exciting options for a final project:

  • Which idea seems more doable or exciting?
  • Are there major red flags or ethical concerns?
  • Does it seem well scoped?
  • If too big or small, can you provide thoughts to scope it in either direction?
  • Are there technical limitations the students need to watch out for? Any other thoughts?
  • Of the two ideas, which one seems better given all this?

If you’re more of a rubric person, I might go with two categories and rank them out of 10:

  • Doable
  • Valuable