The Final Project Proposal will be a draft outline your chosen topic within a Canadian context, with preliminary primary and secondary sources, preliminary findings, an early thesis, research question, or research provocation. 2-3 pages. APA standard format.
Topics – You could focus on:
social justice; artificial intelligence; data privacy; bias and racial justice; various costs of living crises (housing, education, health care); future of… topics; Truth and Reconciliation; impact of misinformation or social media; future of democracy; 2-3 more TBD. Your topic should have an identifiable academic critical engagement with the topic and integrating critical secondary sources in your ‘narrative’ is an excellent method to ensure your critical approach is clear. Students are encouraged to draw on the critical concepts and theories you are gaining expertise in your studies.
You can do a research project, an activist project, a community resource, a data review and/or analysis, or an art project, or almost any other project focus you can think of. Run it by me! You can work with a topic that is historical or contemporary, fictional or documentary, narrative to science / evidence-based, from any disciplinary perspective. You can work on subject areas that extend work that you are already doing in your undergraduate work, or you can investigate new areas of research, academic or artistic practice.
Your project could be an essay, an interactive analytical essay in Twine, a media-rich essay in Esri Story-Maps. You could also design a project that is a fictional or speculative provocation on a topic where the design and content intention are to provoke discussion and raise awareness. This is exactly what FairlyIntelligent.tech is designed to do as it is a provocation as to how we are interpelated by AI, how we are categorized and responded to, how our agency is curtailed. You can include a combination of different elements and link from one platform to another, where you can.
Design Rationale Statement (one sentence for proposal):
Include a preliminary design rationale statement that states the project’s topic, intended audience, and goals and if you have a sense of this, a rationale for why you have chosen X platform(s), and the project’s intended value for possibly a specific community and/or a wider audience. . This design intention statement is a process step to double-check that your design can achieves your goal. This is your chance to run your final project ideas by me so we can discuss.
MINIMUM 3 critical secondary sources:
Your project should have a discernible critical component. You MUST refer to MINIMUM 3 critical secondary sources that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, analytical, evidence-based, and credible. Relying on Blogs, news outlets with histories of misinformation, will lower the grade significantly. These references can be incorporated in your design intention statement in the final (3 pages) if inclusion directly in the project doesn’t make sense. All sources must be English language text.
You MUST include credits for all source material. ALL OF IT. Texts, images, websites, etc. You can and should credit yourself where appropriate. We will review again how to streamline credits working with online platforms as the formatting is not the same as a standard Works Cited in academic formats. You can review how students integrated credits working with both hyperlinks and end credits in the past student projects here:
to an external site.
Past Student Projects:
Pandemic Reveals InequalitiesLinks to an external site.
The Over-Incarceration of Aboriginal Peoples in CanadaLinks to an external site.
“Documenting Black Families”Links to an external site.
Indigenous Peoples and European Colonization of CanadaLinks to an external site.
Surviving the OddsLinks to an external site.
Growing Up Asian CanadianLinks to an external site.
The topics provided this year are intentionally broad within thematic constraints as my experience in the past is that students come up with amazing projects that never would have happened if I had put much more structure in place and narrowed the topic focus.
You can change your mind as to the format and you don’t have to have decided on the format.
I am designing example projects:
to an external site. – a short 3 page design rationale will be posted over March 2 weekend.
A Compassionate Aging PSA Campaign – will be up over March 2 weekend.
Feel free to run your topic focus by me.
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Academic expectations regarding citations for a 3rd-year university course:
Make sure to consult the APA website exclusively. You do not want to go through the Academic Integrity Review process.
to an external site.
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Final Project Grading Rubric – components – so you know what you are aiming for:
1. Design Intention – What is the topic and/or question you are addressing? Why have you chosen X platform(s)? What is the key critique or provocation you wish to communicate? How clearly is this/these communicated?
2. Efficacy in design – How effective is your project in design and communication? Use of the chosen platform?
3. Critical Engagement with your chosen topic – Digital Humanities projects present a critical perspective on the topic and material. A critical approach asks questions, advances critiques, crafts arguments, documents methodologies, offers findings from analysis, builds on the works of others. Projects that are descriptive do not meet this requirement. You do not have to include secondary source materials in your project if it doesn’t make sense. You MUST refer to MINIMUM 3 critical secondary sources that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, analytical, evidence-based, and credible. Relying on Blogs, news outlets with histories of misinformation, will lower the grade significantly.
4. Accuracy of Academic Citations – APA is required. Refer to the multiple resources provided to ensure you understand what academic citation is. Using non-English sources in your in-text citations and/or your Works Cited will result in an automatic non-negotiable 25% deduction. A url is not a citation.
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Resources for developing research questions and topics:
Project Management, Emory University
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Professor Shannon Mattern on mapping:
Tip:
– Scale & scope – keep your project manageable in size. You may have a really big project in mind that will be beyond the scope of the course to complete. Having worked with all three platforms, you will have a sense of what’s achievable in a short span of time. Think in terms of what communicates effectively in a shorter scale & scope rather than attempting something you won’t be able to complete. It also works to think in terms of Phase 1 for large projects that you may want to continue after the course.
TIPS re. platform / format choices:
– Get feedback – user test & play test when you think you have a demo in hand. If you are working on a more narrative project (sequence / story) this might be harder to see in a short segment.
– Think about your audience & the individual user / viewer. Who are they? What is the value of the project to this audience? What do you want to communicate? What is the most effective way to do this?
Where is your user? At home on a laptop? In situ with mobile in hand? What would work better for your project as an optimum experience?
These two modes (desktop / mobile) are two very different experiences and you should design differently for these. You can’t always design for both so decide which is your optimum. Not everything works on a small screen.
– Test by proxy – If you’re interested in Story Maps or Twine & curious about the experience on mobile, load an Esri Story Map or Twine on your phone & see what that feels like.
– If you know that your app works best on a specific browser, say so on the landing page.
“Works best in X…” We are very used to that now!
Feedback from me is a given – run your ideas by me as you have more questions.
Make something you will be proud of, that means something to you.
We will have play / user testing before the final submission so you can get feedback from your peers.
I’ll find you again for the final project
