Digital projects work best when you document your process, decisions, and the results of intermediate parts of your project. Good documentation helps you keep track of where you are in the project so that you can get back to work after an interruption and so that any teammates can tell where you are in the project and how it might affect their role. Good documentation also helps later, if you need to replicate your work, or if you need to share or justify your methodology. While you’re working, make notes about:
Where did you get your content and what did you do to it to make it usable for your project?
What steps did you take, and in what order?
What tools or programs did you use for each step? What settings or choices did you make at each step?
Did you try things that didn’t work? What didn’t work, and how did you modify your process as a result?
Were there things you would like to do that you couldn’t because of limitations of content or available tools?
It is hard to maintain documentation while you’re working, but you should never trust that you’ll remember what you did, even if you’re just stopping work for one day. Try to get into a pattern of taking notes, and come up with a process you can maintain. For example, you might jot down some quick bullet points, take screenshots, or even record voice memos while you’re working, and then take fifteen minutes at the end of each work session to write up more coherent, streamlined notes. Consider using keywords, comments, headings, and other navigation elements to make it easier to find things in your notes, and use screenshots, photos of handwritten notes, tables, and other visual representations to make your notes clearer.
by Beth Fischer, Hannah Jacobs, and Melissa J. Lingle-Martin
ML
Published: Mar 06, 2020
In many cases, a narrative project is itself a form of documentation that expresses the outcome of other research. However, you will likely need additional documentation that explains how the narrative project took on its final form, what resources it used, and who was involved.
Most of the documentation for a timeline project will likely be included in the timeline itself, either in the code (for technical details) or in the content itself.
Even if you are working alone, dimensional projects can be particularly opaque to revisit as you troubleshoot, and it is especially frustrating to make a model work and then not remember what settings you used to get there.
