5. Licensing
• Did you pay for the tool/platform that you
want to use?
• Did you have to pay for it once, or do you
have to renew it annually?
• How will your users interact with the
platform?
6. Licensing, continued
• Case 1:
• You probably produce many documents in Microsoft
Word, and send them to other people (or print
them out to give to people.)
• Case 2:
• You produce documents in Microsoft Word, and you
want other people to edit those documents with
you, using Microsoft Word’s collaborative editing
features.
7. Ownership
• In what space was your project built?
• Your personal site?
• The university’s webspace?
• Where is the project supposed to “live”
after completion?
• Where did the funding for the project
come from?
8. Platform Support & Lifespan
• Who made the platform you want to use?
• Is it open source?
• What kind of user support is available?
• How is maintenance of the platform (not
your project, but the platform itself)
funded? (Grants? Donations?)
• Is it new and shiny? Or old and reliable?
9. Who is your audience?
• You
• Specialized scholarly audience
• Other digital/multimodal scholars
• Students
• The general public
10. Flexibility
• Can you import your data (i.e., prepare it
outside of the platform?)
• Can you export your data?
• In a way that allows other people to
see what the platform does?
• In a way that allows you to use the
data in other platforms?
11. Robustness
• For a platform to be “robust,” it needs to be able to
handle unexpected input or actions in a way that
allows the user to fix the problem and continue with
minimal fuss.
• While this definition of robust is generally agreed
upon, the precise standards for robustness are
essentially subjective.
12. Is it robust?• If something goes wrong, does the platform
return a blank screen, or crash entirely?
• If something goes wrong, does the platform
provide an error message that allows you
to figure out what part of your input
caused the problem?
NOT ROBUST!
ROBUST!
13. Hosting
• If a platform is web-based (sometimes referred to as “server-side”), then
someone else is making sure that the platform works, and gets upgraded.
• Pro: you don’t have to install or maintain it.
• Con: you’re dependent on being online for the platform to work.
• If the platform is locally hosted (sometimes referred to as “client-side”),
then it’s on your computer.
• Pro: you don’t have to be online! (this is handy anytime you’re
demonstrating your project outside of your home institution)
• Con: you may need to have more programming skills to install and
maintain the platform on your own machine/server.
14. Visibility
• Some platforms may allow you to use them
for free, provided you make your data
public:
• Are you concerned about other people
accessing your data?
• Could your data be considered
someone else’s property?
15. The choices you make
in choosing tools are an
essential part of your
documentation.
16. On with the tools!
• Data visualization (ManyEyes)
• Mapping/GIS tools(Community Walk,
Google Maps, Google Earth,ArcGIS)
• MIT Simile
• Display (Scalar, Omeka)
• Project Management (Pivotal Tracker)
17. Many Eyes
• Free text and numerical data visualization
engine, made by IBM
• http://www-
958.ibm.com/software/analytics/manyeyes/
• Usable on Mac/PC, but only in browsers
that run Java (i.e., not Google Chrome)
18. Pros
• Easy to try out different
visualizations using the same text
• Easy to upload datasets
• Allows visualizations to be saved
and emailed to other people
who can view them without a
login
• Access to everyone else’s data
set
• Only accessible online
• No export capability
• Dependent on Java
• No privacy: your data is
everyone’s data
Cons
21. Pros
• Free!
• Web-based
• Reasonable range of functionality
• Allows multiple maps to be created
in one account
• Unique site login can be shared
without compromising online
persona
• Can’t block ads
• Awkward User Interface (UI)
Cons
23. Pros
• Free!
• Web-based
• Unobtrusive ads
• Reasonable range of functionality
• Linked to Google Account for
easy portability/access
• Designed for navigation
• Linked to existing Google
Account
• Lack of functionality
• Dependent on Google
maintaining the tool
Cons
25. Pros
• Free!
• No ads
• Historical map integration
• Robust functionality
• May need to pay for pro-
account, depending on your
goals
• Not web-based
• May be more complex than you
need
• Dependent on Google
maintaining it
Cons
29. Pros
• Free!
• Open access for easy collaboration
• Web-based or locally hosted
• Unique (no current rivals)
• Highly customizable
• Data can be stored in GoogleDoc
• Open access and always in
development (stability issues)
• Requires HTML, more
programming skill for
customization
• Documentation is spotty
Cons
31. Pros
• Free!
• Web-based
• Unique in its capability for
creating non-linear paths
• Customizable
• Supported by investment and
use of multiple organizations
• It’s in open beta, and still new
• It requires you to host
material on the Scalar website
• Documentation is not yet
extensive
• Dependent on continued
funding
Cons
33. Pros
• Free (for public projects, and
non-profit/academic projects)
• Supported by paid users
• Customizable
• Sophisticated, friendly user-
interface
• iOS compatible
• It’s project management
software -- not a project
platform
• Dependent on your
willingness to make your
project public, continued
funding, or academic/nonprofit
status
Cons
34. Just a few of the many places
you can check for tools:
https://www.washington.edu/itconnect/wares/uwa
re/
http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/
http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/
40. What are the components of
the objects you work with?
• Book: words, pages, author(s), editor(s), publisher(s),
reader(s), physical edition(s), digital editions, reader
responses
• Performance: sound/video file, performer, venue,
date/time, program
41. This:
Book: words, pages, author(s), editor(s), publisher(s), reader(s),
physical edition(s), digital editions, reader responses
gets broken down even
further.
42. <text xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0"
xml:id="d1">
<body xml:id="d2">
<div1 type="book" xml:id="d3">
<head>Songs of Innocence</head>
<pb n="4"/>
<div2 type="poem" xml:id="d4">
<head>Introduction</head>
<lg type="stanza">
<l>Piping down the valleys wild, </l>
<l>Piping songs of pleasant glee, </l>
<l>On a cloud I saw a child, </l>
<l>And he laughing said to me: </l>
</lg>
TEI Encoding of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence
(from TEI By Example: http://www.TEIbyexample.org)
43. Depending on the decisions
you make regarding your
data, people will be able to
do different things with it.