Use the page below to discover more about the processes involved in our project. The page is divided into four sections: definitions; the criteria and process for selecting the project; project documentation; and bibliographies on activism.
The project was presented at the ALA Conference in 2017 by Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Kelley Lawton and Hannah Rozear. Here is the PowerPoint slide and handout which accompanied the poster session.
Definitions:
What is Activism? In order to represent student activism at Duke, we wanted to understand the definition of activism. As the Research Group worked through the materials in the Duke University Archives it became clear that our conception of activism was rooted in movements from the late 50s owwards, especially those focused on Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. Research in the 30s and 40s gave us a very different view, prompting us to formulate our own defintion. We recognized the powerful value of non-violent social change as well as the dilemma of understanding “social and political views.” Does that mean that the views could be from either the right or the left? Could activism be generated by an individual? We decided on this definition, “actions by an individual, group or coalition which challenge the status quo in an organized way.”
How we selected the project:
Our objectives for the project included a number of skills we wanted to acquire. They were the following:
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- Multimedia data management software
- Copyright permissions and access
- Text analysis
- GIS
- Visualization
- Data cleanup
- Metadata cleanup
- Project management and communication
- Championing a project from start to finish
- Preservation
- Documentation
- Text encoding
- Working with primary materials
- API
We identified a number of projects which would meet our criteria:
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- Duke course syllabi analysis
- Architecture at Duke
- Founding, development and growth of Duke Kunshan University
- Student organizations
- Race relations at Duke
- Opera programs
- History of Duke faculty
- Unionization at Duke
Ultimately student activism was chosen due to a number of factors including availability of source materials and the potential interest to Duke students, faculty and alumni. It also met most of our criteria for meeting our skill development goals.
Project Documentation:
The Project proposal identifies the goals and objectives of the project, some ideas about how the project will be implemented, the stakeholders (there were none in our case) and clients (we had no clients).
The Scope document defines the limits of the project, what is to be included, but more importantly what the project is not. Scope "creep" is one of the more difficult aspects of ambitious projects and can really affect the focus and the outcomes of the project in a disruptive way.
Gantt chart: This was an agile project, that is, deadlines for one part of the project were determined by other parts of the project. The Gantt chart was created as the project moved forward and deadlines identified as each piece was completed. In our case there were no stakeholders besides ourselves and no client insisting on a deadline. Projects rarely have this luxury, and experts recommend organizing projects by first determining the final hand-over and working back from that deadline. In such cases the Gantt chart is created from the beginning in order to keep the project on track, to determine contingencies between different parts of the project and to include slip time when one part of a project is dependent on the conclusion of another. This Gantt chart uses Excel software.
In the previous year Research and Instructional Services librarians at Duke University Libraries were asked to outline the different stages of the research life cycle according to discipline. These provided a starting point for organizing the project as they identify pivotal questions to ask in advance of different stages of the project. For example, storage and preservation issues, although they might not be implemented until later the process, will affect other major decisions as a project moves forward.
The Text Mining Group had to develop a detailed list of steps in the text mining process. To view these see text-mining documentation.