Your final project for the course will be to complete a piece of computational text analysis that addresses a research question in your field of choice. You should use one or more of the techniques covered in class, but you need not use all of them, nor must you limit yourself to those methods.
More information about the project will be added here as the due date draws nearer. For now, a few points to help guide your proposal:
- You will submit code, data, and written analysis of the results, which together will consitute the project.
- The written portion should total 6-10 pages, or about 2,500-3,000 words. Total effort expended on the project (including data collection and curation, coding, etc.) should be equivalent to a 20-page seminar paper (on the very rough order of 20-30 hours, maybe more).
- You may work with one or two partners to produce a joint project. If you do, you should scale your ambitions linearly with headcount.
Your first task is to write a brief (300-500 word) project proposal. This will be due on paper(!) in class on Monday, 4/8.
Your proposal should include the following elements:
- A statement of the research problem you intend to address and the hypothesis you intend to examine (or the exploratory direction you intend to pursue). This will typically involve reference to existing scholarship, but you need not do a great deal of that at this early stage
- A description of the corpus you will use and how you will build or acquire it.
- A precis of the methods you will use and why they are appropriate to the task.
- A consideration of any special difficulties you anticipate. If you are working with a partner, this section should include a tentative distribution of tasks.
That's a lot to fit into one page. Details will obviously be light, and you're free to run long if you like. I'd certainly encourage you to think hard about what you want to do and what you can reasonably accomplish in the scope of the late semester.
For now, see above. More information here in the weeks ahead.