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Resource Assessment

The next step in our process is figuring out what resources you have available to you and what you still need in order to accomplish your project's objectives.

Types of Resources

  1. data
  2. technology
  3. human
  4. institution
  5. financial

Data, Digital Assets, Collections

Do you have the dataset you need to do your project? Finding, cleaning, storing, managing changes in, and sharing your data is an often overlooked but extremely important part of designing your project. Successfully finding a good dataset means that you should keep in mind: Is the dataset the appropriate size and complexity to help address your project's goals? Finding, using, or creating a good dataset is a core part of your project's long-term success.

Activity:

** What data resources do you have at your disposal? What do you still need? What steps do you need to take during the course of your project in order to work with the dataset now that you have a general sense of what the data needs to look like if you are working with either textual or numeric data? **

No?

  • If not, do you know where to go to find it?
  • Is it digitized?
  • Do you need to create it yourself?
  • Is it under copyright?
  • Is it free to your institution? over the web?
  • Who could you talk to about finding, accessing, or digitizing what you need?

Yes?

  • What format does your data need to be in so that you can begin working with it?
  • Is the data in a format that you can use?
  • If not, how will you get it into that format? How long will it take? Are you unsure?
  • What is the biggest challenge that your dataset presents?
  • What should go well?
  • What makes your dataset interesting?
  • Do you plan to make your dataset open? If yes, how will you do that? (GitHub?)
  • If you do not plan to make your dataset open, where will you store it? Will you make it available to fellow researchers upon request? How will you communicate that?
  • If you do not know what format your data needs to be in, whom will you ask for more information?
  • Will your efforts and cleaning and preparing data be useful to anyone else? Would you be willing to share your methods? How would you do so?
  • Will your data be standardized so that it can be combined with other datasets? What standards will you use?
  • How will you fill gaps?
  • How long will it take for you to be able to answer all of these questions? (You are unlikely to be able to do it all today.)

Technology

  • Name all the types of technology that you will need to go from "raw data" to "final project"? If you don't know the name of the technology, you can just describe it. (Example: First I will scrape texts from poetry websites like poets.org from the internet using a python library called Beautiful Soup. Next, I will clean my data using Python, explore the data in NLTK to look for coocurrances of the words "painting" and "sea." I will store my results using GitHub, and visualize the results using the D3.js libraries. I will use these visualizations to write the second half of my article. When the project is done, I will deposit the dataset into the Academic Works repository." )

  • Do you need a server or other cloud computing environment?

  • Do you have someone who can work on the public-facing presence of the project (design skills)?

  • Where will you host your project?

  • How much time do you think will need to be dedicated to tech support for the project?

  • Do you need mobile devices? 3D printers? other hardware or software?

  • Will you choose open source platforms or proprietary ones?

Example:

Have: basic knowledge of git and python and some nltk

Need: I need a more powerful computer, to learn how to install and use Beautiful Soup, and to get help cleaning the data. I will also need to learn about the D3.js library.

Human resources

Looking back at the Audiences worksheet, review which of your audiences were invested in your work. Who can you draw on for support? Consider the various roles that might be necessary for the project. Who will fill those roles?

  • design
  • maintenance and support
  • coding/programming
  • outreach / documentation
  • project management

Locally:

  • Have you met anyone at this week's institute who is working on a similar kind of project that uses similar methods?
  • Are there other colleagues in your program who are interested in using similar technologies or methods?
  • Is there a digital scholarship librarian at your college? Have you signed up for the GC Digital Fellows email list?
  • Who is going to manage the work of the project? Is it you? What if the project grows?
  • Do you need to bring someone on board who has a more extensive digital skill set? Other content knowledge? Describe what that person would do on the project.

Remote:

  • Is there an online research community that you could connect to such as an online forum? blog? research center?
  • If you have presented at a conference or are part of a scholarly society or other group, do they have a listserv with people who are interested in the same technologies or research questions?
  • Do people in your field use Twitter or another social network platform to communicate? Could you create a hashtag for people who share similar research interests and/or technology needs?

Institution

  • What resources are available to you through your institution?
  • What services or support might be available through the GC Digital Initiatives, the Teaching & Learning Center, the New Media Lab, or the Futures Initiative? If you are not at the GC, does your insitution have a digital research support network?
  • Have you joined the CUNY Academic Commons?
  • Have you applied for internal funding? Where would you look?
  • Are there resources at your institution for hosting, data sharing, and/or preservation?

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