Content Creation Assignment

--- title: Content Creation Assignment tags: assignment --- #### [⬅️ Return to course website](http://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1951-v/#assignments-box) <span style="font-size: 50px;">**Content Creation Assignment**</span> :::info **Released: September 21st** **Due: October ~~5th~~ 6th 11:59pm ET** ::: :::warning Reminder: There are no late days for non-code assignments! ::: # Introduction :::info Note: You should complete the Dash component of Lab 1.5 before starting this assignment. ::: :::warning Important: Make sure to use Novice mode, **not** Developmer mode while working on this assignment! Developer mode features are less stable, and things could break. ::: The purpose of this assignment is twofold: first to give you more experience using a modern hypermedia system built on the MERN stack by having you **construct a hypermedia corpus**, and second, to have you **build an interesting narrative trail** à la Bush through that corpus using “Dash Presentation Trails”. This assignment has a lot of freedom and will require some creativity on your part; think of it as a creative writing assignment using hypermedia. We suggest you build the assignment around a hobby, a course, or set of courses, i.e., some topic or project that interests you — it could be donuts 🍩. <div style ="text-align:center; margin-bottom: 20px; width: 600px;"><img style="border-radius:5px;" src="https://i.imgur.com/QyQJdJY.png"/> </div> **Think of an interesting story/narrative** that you want to tell using a hypertext corpus where you will use both **free-form exploration** (i.e. panning/zooming over the workspace, scrolling text-based documents, following links, etc.) and **guided exploration** using a presentation trail which lets you define and sequence through particular points of view on your corpus as a sequence of snapshots/slides. The presentation trail provides a “backbone” of a guided tour, but the viewer is free to wander and explore the corpus at will, and then resume the tour. Think of a guided museum tour but with the freedom to wander to other rooms not explicitly on the main tour and then resume the tour where you left off. Your chosen story/narrative should inform which media documents you want to import or drag in from the Web to support your story, and what RTF text notes of your own are that you want to add (e.g. summaries, commentary, explanations, sources, etc). Your narrative needn’t be long -- the hypermedia equivalent of a “short story” rather than a novel. **The whole experience should be 5-8 minutes** -- we just want you to get a taste of both Dash and the idea of this form of Bush-style narrative based on a hypermedia corpus. (Of course, after you’ve done the basic assignment well, we’d love you to read about additional features and create a more interesting corpus and narrative, but it isn’t necessary for the assignment.) We are only introducing you to the basic features of Dash, though we encourage you to explore its more advanced features time permitting. Please note that advanced features may be less stable and more error prone. # Dash Basics Some things to keep in mind while working with Dash: 1. Dash supports a variety of documents, which can range from images to PDFs to collections of other documents. For a list of document options, you can click on the workspace and type a ":" symbol. 2. A Dash dashboard is made up of documents and nested collections of documents laid out on a 2D unbounded canvas which users can freely pan and zoom. Users can include documents in collections to express spatial or hierarchical structures, as well as create links between documents to express additional relationships. 4. RTF (rich text format) text documents can be used for annotations or to relate two or more other types of documents as the connector explaining the relationships, with links to those related documents. 6. Documents are never deleted in Dash, however, you can close a document to remove it from your current view. Closed documents can be found and brought back to view through the “Recently closed” flyout panel. 7. Presentation trails are a way of showing a guided tour of documents. Think of Presentation Trails as a cross between Powerpoint and Prezi with the great advantage of allowing free-form exploration to be freely mixed with the guided tour. 3. Dash supports a number of different views of a dashboard, called perspectives. For this assignment, you only need to use the free-form layout perspective. Think of the free-form perspective, the documents, and the collections as a fluid, flexible, feature-rich example of what the 40-year-old desktop/document/folder metaphor could become. 5. Dash contains a built-in tiled window manager that mimics what a browser like Chrome provides. Tabs are similar to browser tabs in that multiple tabs can be opened at the same time. Tiles are similar to browser windows in that adjacent tiles can share the Dash canvas real estate, which corresponds to opening multiple browser windows that share the computer screen real estate. For this assignment you may only need a single tile, and possibly only one tab for one outer collection, but feel free to play around with your layouts. The arrangement of tiles and tabs is called a dashboard and in general you might have multiple ones; you only need one for this assignment. ## Do’s & Don’ts ### Do - Use Google Chrome while working with Dash. - Be patient! Sometimes the system is slow, especially on importing large PDFs and videos. - Report any weird/unexpected behaviors by clicking on the bug icon in the upper right corner of the screen and filling out the bug report form. This will be very helpful to the Dash team. - Refresh the browser often! This will restore your corpus to a pristine state and can sometimes fix any weird/unexpected behaviors you encounter. :::info Note: Refreshing will cause you to lose the undo/redo stack from the prior session ::: ### Don't - Hesitate to ask questions! If you have questions after reviewing the [documentation](https://brown-dash.github.io/Dash-Documentation/), don't hesitate to post to Slack in the `#dash` channel. - Import videos longer than 5 minutes, since load times can get pretty long. --- Here are the three parts of the assignment. We expect the full assignment to take less than 8 hours, including learning the basics of Dash. ## 1. Building the corpus - Familiarize yourself with the general facilities of Dash by watching the short set of overview videos available [**here**](https://brown-dash.github.io/Dash-Documentation/videos/). Some precise interactions/UIs may not be fully up-to-date, but they will give you the flavor of Dash. - To build the corpus, import a variety of media of your choice to your dashboard, arrange them, and incorporate hypertext features like linking and annotation. ## 2. Creating your trail - Build at least one trail through selected items in your corpus that you can narrate using Presentation Trails. Use this to develop your narrative, but keep in mind that your guided tour can be stopped for free-form exploration at any time. - We recommend watching the the example narratives [here](#Example-Narratives) to get a better undestanding of how to do this. ## 3. Presenting - Make a **5-8 minute video** of your hypermedia narrative. You should screen record yourself presenting your trail, while providing a voice-over about your narrative. - Here are some example videos to get an idea of what it means to build a Hypermedia Narrative. Remember that these are just examples to help you get an idea of what a narrative could look like, not what it should look like! 1. [Brynn's Dash Hypermedia Narrative on **Baking**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgAn9M8h--E) 2. [Nick's Dash Hypermedia Narrative on **Robotics**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVUI2RZXN0s) 3. [Rosemary’s Dash Hypermedia Narrative on **Poetry** ](https://youtu.be/tuIEWUKxXJQ) 2. [Geireann’s Dash Hypermedia Narrative on **The “British” Museum** ](https://youtu.be/vm4e6r8M5xo) Please note that although Rosemary and Geireann both refer to features of Dash, this is only for demonstrative purposes; the focus of your voice-over should be your narrative. # Grading This is a very open-ended assignment and some of you will be more creative than others; we will look for a baseline of effort and use a very simple ABC/NC grading scheme. At a minimum, we expect you to make use of **at least four different types of nodes**: - Images - Videos - Text - PDFs - Annotations - Nested collections - etc. You should also incorporate **at least four different types of hypertext features**: - Links between entire documents - Linking between parts of documents, between an entire document to part of another document, etc. - Embedding marquee selections on PDFs - Embedding text annotations and marquee selections on images - Pin with view for your slides - Various movement, visibility, and duration options for your trail You should have enough documents/features to fit a 5-8 minute presentation, but please make sure all the documents in your corpus and all the slides in your presentation trail **fit into your narrative**. Place quality over quantity - that is, don’t simply make documents for the sake of numbers. You're welcome to try adding additional features, but please note that these are experimental and may not be stable. Overall, we are not expecting masterworks, but something representing some thoughts and execution, taking, from start to finish, less than 8 hours including learning the basics of Dash. We can't wait to see how you use it! ### Rubric |Category | A | B | C | NC | | -------- | -------- | -------- | -------- | -------- | | Nodes [45% weight] | Appropriate use of 4 or more different node types. | Appropriate use of 3 different node types. | Appropriate use of 2 different node types. | Appropriate use of 0-1 different node types. | | Hypertext Features [45% weight] | Appropriate use of 4 or more different hypertext features. | Appropriate use of 3 different hypertext features. | Appropriate use of 2 different hypertext features. | Appropriate use of 0-1 different hypertext features. | | Presentation Duration [10% weight] | 5-8 minutes in length (up to 30 seconds leeway in either direction) | Longer than 9.5 minutes or shorter than 4.5 minutes | Longer than 10.5 minutes or shorter than 3.5 minutes | Longer than 10.5 minutes or shorter than 3.5 minutes | Your grade will be the weighted average of your score in each of the three categories (A=3pts, B=2pts, C=1pts, NC=0pts). # Handin Upload your video as unlisted or public to YouTube. Submit the link to your video and respond to a few questions about your project in [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScBbC9fgHxlIrsrOEwpW4JxmPnFkSxrTVMl6xHNWPLfcX_Dlw/viewform?usp=sf_link). # In-Class Presentations We'll choose a few students to present their presentation trails in class over the next few weeks. We'll Slack you before class to let you know if you'll be presenting.