The Final Project offered an opportunity to apply theories and explored subjects discussed this semester. As I worked, I broke it into two parts: there was the DH project and the project proposal.

DH Project: The eBay Fashion Exhibit

After the data visualization praxes, I knew I wanted to explore vintage or secondhand ecommerce platforms in more depth. I thought I was interested in internet research and digital cultures, and some of the casual observations I made about how the listings were written and how that data could be presented visually solidified that notion. I bookmarked them as ideas to revisit.

Finding related projects helped refine my idea to reimagine content from eBay listings. Tega Brain’s Post The Met and the #exstrange project served as examples of how to decontextualize these digital artifacts to ask questions about digital platforms and cultural authority. From there, it became much easier to identify a theoretical framework. David Nieborg and Thomas Poell’s article, The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity articulated how to analyze the phenomenon of platformization in cultural industries (2018). Using their examination of news and gaming industries as case studies, I could better articulate how market forces, governance, and infrastructures at play impacted the vintage fashion item as a cultural commodity.

Project Proposal

Knowing grant writing takes a very specific form, I was nervous about how to approach the proposal. I had never written one before, and at first I found it difficult to know how the work I did to formulate the project and ground it theoretically contributed to the proposal. I sought examples of successfully funded grant applications to better understand what to include and how to do so. Eventually, I understand how to articulate the project’s purpose and activities.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the process of creating and proposing a DH project, even though at the beginning, I just wanted to build.