Data Excavation Lab Planning Board by Kelly O'Neill

What kind of data do you want to create? Do you see yourself wanting to capture quantities or qualities?

koneill64 — 2025-10-21 17:18:15 UTC

Are you interested in a particular location in Ukraine, or in a kind of place?

koneill64 — 2025-10-21 17:18:56 UTC

If the answer is the latter, what kind of place or environmental context interests you? For example: the course of a river, the mouth of a river, a bog or marsh or wetland area, a town with/near a river, farmlands or forests, migration or travel routes, habitats, etc.

What scale speaks to you? Do you want to collect data that describes thousands of square miles, or maybe just an acre?

koneill64 — 2025-10-21 17:19:30 UTC

*The thing to keep in mind here is that spatial data describes change across space. In other words, there must be a variable that you can assess.

What source genre speaks to you? Cartographic? Narrative? Visual?

koneill64 — 2025-10-21 17:19:44 UTC

Do you want to perform a deep dive into a single source or work with a set?

koneill64 — 2025-10-21 17:20:04 UTC

* If you opt for the latter, consider working with a set of related materials: maps from a series, articles from a particular periodical, a set of photographs by the same person.

What about timeperiod and timeframe?

koneill64 — 2025-10-21 17:20:31 UTC

Are you drawn to a contemporary topic or a historical one? Are you interested in an event and/or its after-effects? Alternately, are you interested in exploring something that happens regularly / at frequency (such as annual flooding or field preparation)?

You will be working with the other lab members in one way or another.

koneill64 — 2025-10-21 17:21:11 UTC

As a group, you will need to decide whether to all work on the same source(s), the same topic(s), and/or the same location(s). We want everyone to have the independence to work at their own pace, but we also want each individual dataset to contribute to the whole.