Department/Faculty: Department of Philosophy

Campus Address: 3-67 Assiniboia Hall

Campus Phone number: (780) 248-1209

E-mail address: Geoffrey.Rockwell@ualberta.ca

Project Title: Day of DH : Aggregating 24 Hours of Digital Humanities Academia

Funding Source(s):

Summary of Project / Research Design. Please attach a more detailed proposal

(i.e., 1-2 pages), including a description of the population from which research participants will be drawn (e.g., university students, nursing home residents) and a discussion of how research participants will be solicited. Also attach copies of research instruments (e.g., questionnaires, interview guides).

This study will look at a day in the life of a Humanities Computing researcher. It will follow an approved group of academics and others in the field as they document their day, textually and through visual media. The project will consist of three phases. The focus on the phase leading up to the "Day of DH" will be in the collaborative possibilities of design in organizing a worldwide group of academic participants, while after the day the focus will be on the dataset that is created and ways of interfacing with such data. Finally, the actual day of documentation and its content will serve as a light, playful way of connected the people of the field.

The project will be announced primarily through mailing lists [see attached "Draft of Announcement"] , at which time participation will solicited. Interested parties will need to apply to participate, and their applications will be subject to approval by the principal investigators. There will also be a small number (i.e. less than five) of keynote participants. These will be well-known persons in the field who, rather than applying to participate, will be to directly solicited to do so [see attached "Skeleton of Personal Letter"].

Participants will consist primarily of academics, with the possibility of public-sector employees in technology-based areas relevant to the humanities. We anticipate that most of the population will be PhD^?'s and graduate students, though a healthy diversity will be encouraged. Once approved, participants will be considered co-authors of the project, with the project as a sort of mini-publication. We understand, and by design anticipate, a collaborative evolution of the project at the hands of the creative individuals participating.

This project will be presented as an online publication, with the project data aggregated and presented digitally. Additionally, raw data will be available for download for reworking. The eventual release of this dataset, and its potential as a test set for exploring ways of visualizing data, will be one of the stimulants in gathering interest in the project.

See also attached "Day of DH Timeline", "Draft of Instructions", and "Ethics Addendum".

Assessment of Risk to Human Participants: There are three levels in which humans could be put affected risk in the study. First, there will be the actual volunteer participants, who will opt-in to the project. The primary risk for the volunteers is that the project's information will be based on their personal information and publicly accessible online.

There may also be incidentally affected subjects: those that appear in the volunteers' photographs and those that are mentioned in the text. As with the volunteers their risks are in the personal information implied by the data (e.g. their location at a certain time may be verified, information they may have been withholding from somebody).

See below on how these risks will be minimized.

Description of Procedures to be Undertaken to Reduce Risk to Human Subjects.

By the nature of the project, participants will be authors of the material connected to them, and therefore in control of the information about them that is present in the project. They will be fully informed of the uses of their data and warned the risks present through their participation.

Part of the instruction for participants will be to minimize the number of external parties that are captured in photographs. For any easily distinguishable parties that are photographed, participants will have them fill out the attached "Permission to Take Photograph Form".

In textual data, participants will be instructed to use their discretion in mentioning other persons. Nevertheless, all submitted data will be reviewed by the investigators before it is made public. Any textual reference to a person that may present risk to them will be edited out. Risk assessment of all the content will be an explicit goal of the editorial process.

-- PeterOrganisciak - 21 Oct 2008