Agile Project Management for Humanities Research (DHSI 2026)

Description

Agile project management is about negotiating the completion of a project from beginning to end while remaining flexible. Being patient and delaying decisions until you have to make them, gathering as much information as you can in the meantime, and then taking action with the information you have, always keeping alternatives in mind in case your first plan of action doesn’t pan out. It’s about more than just negotiating within the rules. It’s about changing the rules of the game to better ensure a successful project.

Over the course of the week, participants will learn about how different teams could approach managing different aspects of a project. Participants will explore applying these to their own project(s). By the end of the week, participants will have an initial plan of action for managing their own project(s).

Instructor(s)

Over the years, James Smith has had computing interests that include exploring REST, linked open data, and other components of the web-as-platform as a foundation for building sharable, long-lived digital contributions to the humanities. More recently, he has focused on emphasizing the human element in computing.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)