Project 1: Final Project

Description

The final project for this course may take one of two forms:

  1. You may apply a computational humanities tool to a dataset of your choice.
  2. You may create an original creative digital work. It may involve any combination of text, images, and music that you wish. The creative work must have an algorithmic aspect at its core.

Either form of project will require submitting the following:

  • A project proposal.
  • An oral presentation in the final exam period for the course.
  • A paper, either analyzing your results or reflecting upon your creative work.
  • All code and data used in creating the project, sufficient to digitally reproduce your work.

The first step in your project is developing a proposal. The format differs somewhat for analytic and creative projects. Either way, the proposal is due at the beginning of class on Friday, April 15.

Proposal: Analytic Projects

There are three required sections of an analytic proposal.

Research Question

Clearly state a research question you wish to address through your project. Introduce your topic and its relevance to the course material.

Data Set

Identify the corpus of data you will be using for your analysis. Who gathered and organized this data? How large is the data (number of individual files/documents/images, total file size?)

References

Include references to sources you will use to inform your analysis.

Proposal: Digital Creative Work

There are four required sections of a creative proposal.

Creative Medium

Describe the creative medium you wish to employ. Is it music? Text? Images? A visual novel? Something else?

Also discuss your motivation for exploring that medium. Why does the medium interest you?

Creative Goals

What impact would you like to have on the audience for your creative work? How do you plan to achieve that impact? Include both some intermediate goals and some final goals.

Creation System

Describe the software you plan to use to create your work.

Assessment

How do you plan to assess the degree to which your creative work meets your goals for impact on its audience?

Progress Report

During the last week of classes, each student will give a progress report. Each progress report should consist of four PowerPoint style slides:

  • Project Overview
  • Current Achievements
  • Challenges and Obstacles
  • Plan for Completion

Presentation

You will give a 6 minute presentation during the final exam period for the course.

Practice is strongly encouraged prior to your actual presentation. The best way to be comfortable with presenting in front of an audience is to practice. You will be graded on both the organization and the presentation of your talk. The 6 minute time-limit will be strictly enforced to ensure equal time for all presentations.

Analytic Presentation

Your objective in the presentation is to fill us in on the main ideas of how you approached and analyzed your topic, following the outline below:

  • Introduction
  • Data
  • Algorithm
  • Analysis
  • Future Work
  • References

You should clearly explain the research question, your selected dataset, and the supporting references you used.

Be sure to describe the algorithmic details involved in your work. Is your approach to answer your question rule-based, probabilistic, or a mixture of the two? Does it involve machine learning algorithms? How is your data represented and processed?

Also, you should include at least one graph/image/sound-file of results based on your research. Clearly identify your axes, use colors and labels to quickly convey your information.

Creative Presentation

Your objective in the presentation is to introduce the class to your creative work, the motivation behind it, and the process you employed to create it, following the outline below:

  • Introduction
  • Creative Tools
  • Creative Goals
  • Creation Process
  • Impact on Audience
  • Work Sample
  • Future Work

Clearly explain the algorithmic tools you employed to create your work, as well as your creative goals and the process by which you created your work.

Include at least one slide that shows a sample from your work.

Summary Paper

Your paper must be at least 6 pages. Your paper should be readable by a layperson who is not familiar with your tools and algorithms but has a basic understanding of computer science; essentially, write the paper for a student who has completed CSCI 150: Foundations of Computer Science. Include the same sections as above for the oral presentation.

Be sure to make good use of figures and graphs to demonstrate your results, use proper grammar and spelling, and use proper citations.

Data and Implementation

Include all code and data used in creating the project, sufficient to digitally reproduce your work. Code should be well-abstracted, stylistically clean, and easy to follow. Any Kaggle notebooks should be well-organized including headers and Markdown blocks to denote the different sections of your analysis.

Sample Project Topics

Sample Analytic Project Topics

This list is by no means exhaustive of possible topics. Please use it as inspiration for your own exploration of the concepts in this course.

You might also consider an analytic-based project whose outcome is embedded in a larger system. For example:

Sample Creative Project Topics

  • Create a feature-length (approximately 30 minutes play-through time) Visual Novel using Ren’Py.
  • Create an extended musical work (or a series of related smaller works) using Sonic Pi.
  • Give a Sonic Pi public live coding performance.
  • Create an elaborate piece of algorithmically sophisticated art using Context Free Art.
  • Employ OpenCV to process one or more preexisting images in an artistic way to create new artworks.