Blog Week 7 – Final Group Project Proposal (Assata/Eliza/Josephine)

Group members: Assata, Eliza, and Josephine

Topic: Analyzing frequent topics in the Carleton CLAP magazine, both historical and contemporary, and seeing how they may have changed. Objectives include digitizing (at least some) old CLAPs, running the text through analysis software, and presenting the data in a clean and accessible way.

Proposed Methodology:

• Sources: We will gather CLAPs and CLAP data/information by going to the library archives, where a sizable number of CLAP back issues are stored; by potentially contacting current CLAP staff to see if digital versions of their work exist somewhere; and by using people’s personal CLAP issues if necessary.
• Processes: We will process CLAPs by digitizing them, likely by scanning them and running them through some kind of OCR (optical character recognition) software. We will likely store most of our data in Google Drive. We will try to process the digitized CLAPs by running them through Voyant or potentially some other kind of text analysis software.
• Presentation: We will present our findings on a website, with an embedded, flippable PDF booklet which parodies the CLAP’s format as one of its components. We may use graphs created with software like Rawgraphs.io or Flourish as part of the presentation. We will also be doing the final slideshow presentation in class.

Timeline of Deliverables:

• Early Week 8: collecting CLAPs, exploring digitization options
• Late Week 8: at least some kind of CLAP digitization done
• Early Week 9: digitization complete, data analysis begun
• Late Week 9: data analysis in progress, visualizations/presentation begun
• Week 10: complete! Present to class

Example DH project to emulate: Data-Sitter’s Club #6: Voyant’s Big Day

Our Messages:

Josephine – The Carleton Clap has a unique way of displaying topics trending among students and niche issues on campus. As someone who is interested in creating a more inviting community on campus, the Carleton Clap may provide some weirdly effective ideas on bringing students together.

Assata – The idea for this project, proposed by group member Josephine, initially piqued my interest because I thought it would be funny to conduct a Digital Humanities project based on the CLAP magazine. But after talking it through, I think it would be really cool to explore how the topics and interests highlighted in the CLAPs have changed throughout the years.

Eliza – I thought Josephine’s initial idea was really interesting, and it seemed the most “fun” out of all the topics we had floated around! I hope that by going back into the archives, we might be able to feel more connected to past generations of Carls, and maybe learn a little bit more about the community’s evolution along the way.