A Digital Gazetteer of North Carolina

Each Tuesday we will discuss more substantive / theoretical readings. At the start of the semester, you will sign up to lead one of these discussions. There will be two discussion leaders per Tuesday meeting, so you’ll work together to prepare for and lead the discussion.

Leading discussion means:

• Doing the readings thoroughly
• Identifying key concepts or difficulties to discuss with the class
• Looking for additional examples of the things discussed in the readings
• Looking for connections to other things we’ve done in this class or that you’ve learned in other courses or in your work
• Coming up with a plan for facilitating the discussion

To get some ideas for how to facilitate the discussion, check out Active Learning Techniques for the Classroom or The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies. But you don’t need to get too elaborate, since this is a small class. Feel free to assign me a supporting role.

Assignment 1 covers using OpenRefine and regular expressions. It is due Thursday, February 3 at 11:59PM.

Assignment 2 covers creating linked geographical data as GeoJSON and RDF. It is due Thursday, February 24 at 11:59PM.

Assignment 3 covers SPARQL. It is due Thursday, March 24 at 11:59PM.

Each project group will submit a zip file containing at least:

1. a CSV file with the new and updated gazetteer entries your group created, and
2. a PDF file documenting your group’s work.

See below for further details about what each of these should include.

Some groups may have supplemental CSV files as well. For example, if your group were documenting relationships between people and places in NC, it would make sense to put the data describing the people in a separate CSV file from the primary CSV file describing the places. (I will talk with each group about whether you need supplemental CSV files, and if so what they should look like.)

Submit your zip file using the link below on or before May 3rd.

CSV files

Place data should be submitted in a single CSV file (not XLS or any other spreadsheet format) containing both existing and new gazetteer entries.

If a row is updating an existing entry, it should have a value in the id column matching the id in the current version of the gazetteer. Otherwise the id should be left blank.

Any columns corresponding to existing columns in the current version of the gazetteer should have the same name. So for example if you have a column with Wikidata IDs, it should be named wikidata_id, matching what is in the current version of the gazetteer.

Any new columns you add should have names following the conventions of the existing column names: * all lowercase * multiple words separated by underscores * singular, not plural (e.g. postal_address not postal_addresses)

If you have columns that can have multiple values, use a pipe character (|) to separate the values.

If you wish to credit individual team members for individual entries, you can include two additional columns named creator and contributor. Each column may have multiple values. Each value may be: * the full name of the creator / contributor (e.g. “Ryan Shaw”), or * an ORCID ID identifying the creator / contributor (e.g. “https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5486-159X”).

Registering for an ORCID ID is free, if you wish to do that.

If a row is updating an existing gazetteer entry, the creator column should be blank (since no one in your group created it).

If your group does not include creator and contributor columns in your CSV, I will assume that all group members created the new gazetteer entries, and all group members contributed to the updated gazetteer entries.

Any supplemental CSV files should follow these same formatting conventions.

PDF report

Your PDF should include the following sections:

1. Documentation of your CSV file(s). This should include explanations of any new columns you added, and how to understand the values in these columns if it is not obvious.

2. Documentation of how you think the resulting RDF should look. This can take the form of examples in Turtle format of RDF describing 2 or 3 of your places.

3. Documentation of your research process. This should include details about the sources you consulted and tools you used to produce your CSV file. It should also include a description of sources you consulted that turned out to be not be useful, or other things you tried that did not pan out, or that you did not have time to finish.

4. Ideas for future work. This can include things you ran out of time to do, sources that you found but did not have time to investigate, or anything else that you would suggest a future group might work on.

5. Credit and acknowledgements. This should list each member of your group and state what their contribution was. You can also acknowledge the assistance of others not in the group here.