A friend of mine sent me think link about a Digital Humanities project based at Stanford University by Professor Josiah Ober. This article explains the site and within the article is a link to the DH site itself, called POLIS.
This has me thinking about issues related to my own barely nascent project:
1. A lot of the data that Ober is using was previously published. Ober is well-versed enough in the ancient Greek world to realize that if that very data were put in a new paradigm, different questions could be asked and new answers generated. From the same published data. I think that is very cool.
2. Graduate students helped enter this data. I don't have graduate students and I teach at a place that doesn't have Stanford's resources (to even put my institution and Stanford in the same sentence is nearing silliness). I am just about to embark on a digital project, but this gives me pause. I recall the gurus of my DH for Art History summer workshop, Sharon Leon and Sheila Brennan, noting that we should start small and keep the data "tidy," but I am still feeling rather daunted by what was done with POLIS. My own Italo-Byzantine painting site won't be nearly this large in scope - it's going to be an iconographic project and focused, for now, just on Tuscany in the thirteenth century.
My main question: do people out there have suggestions for someone at the beginning stages of a digital project?
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