Project Management Best Practices

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Miller Krause

Even simple projects in digital humanities involve complex decisions at many different levels of granularity, and managing those decisions adeptly is an art in and of itself. What encodings will work for your documents and keep working when conditions change? What editors will you use to prepare the documents? What metadata tagging and storage systems will bind those documents into collections? How will human users access the collections? What interfaces can other projects leverage to interact with this project? Even before those questions, what needs does the project address, what is its scope, what controls govern its progress, and how does it draw in and keep stakeholders? After the go-live date, how do you determine whether your project was a success? How do you keep everything in focus without losing track of either the details or the big picture? Managing a project means not just getting-it-done but providing for goal-setting, planning, guidance, and evaluation, and doing so without getting in the way of the research. What are the current best practices for managing a digital humanities project? What frameworks and tools help you define, meet, and evaluate your goals?

Categories: General |

About Miller Krause

I am a graduate student in the department of classics, studying Greek and Latin. My dissertation focuses on declamation (fictive oratory) from the Roman world and the Renaissance. In my spare time I study Neo-Latin, roughly defined as anything in Latin from the Renaissance to the modern day; this semester it's meant sixteenth and seventeenth century Huguenot histories of Florida, seventeenth and eighteenth century praises of Venereal disease, and Latin in twentieth century Senegal. Because I can.

1 Response to Project Management Best Practices

  1. Sophia K. Acord says:
    March 10, 2014 at 2:15 pm

    This is a well-proposed session, and one that will help us to explore the social context of starting and managing DH projects. I think that others with project management expertise will be around to help us explore these topics. I can say some things here regarding putting teams together and planning evaluation activities.

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