After looking at the digitized Wooster Voice archives I would be interested in exploring how exclusive the newspaper was to the college community back when it was the print version only. I would also want to look at the kinds of topics it covered and content distribution (eg. whether political news was more than campus gossip). I was curious about who the Voice’s target audience is today versus who it was written for and how that affects exposure to the campus community. These questions are important because they reveal how students have made sense of their experiences on campus and how student culture has evolved. Largely, in DH, they give a range of possible data points that can be researched.
For my questions, I would organize my spreadsheet so that each row represents a single article from the Voice archives. For example, with the content distribution question, each column would have publication date, title, author, topic category (politics, entertainment, arts, sports, greek life etc). I could also do how many student features, their class year, major, and the kind of topics portrayed. For the vocabulary, i would use short words, category kid of labels like politics, alpha, gamma, greek, basketball, administration, student life etc. Anything that makes SEO efficient and also just to have each article coded with specific words/terms.
Data privacy is a significant concern in this project because exposure has changed from print to digital and that comes with ethical concerns especially regarding student features from the past. They may not have anticipated their college time to be digitized years later and very accessible. My spreadsheet would include identifiable information like names and quotes so i would probably ask whether it is necessary to record very personable information or using pseudonyms for certain topics where someone may have said something very personal and exclusive to campus community like the gossip section (that maybe they don’t want someone outside to know).