Final Portfolio F23

Final portfolio Instructions

The final portfolio is made up of two parts: a summary slide that presents what you did for one of your assignments this semester and an “unproject plan”. Both are to be published, although in different formats on your course site. This counts as 20% of your final grade.

Summary Slide (5%)

This exercise is in one step. You should do this assignment yourself, even if you collaborated with another person. You should make a single slide summarizing your results from one of the four assignments. You can think of this as a public-facing poster. You can make your summary slide in Google Slides, Powerpoint or any other poster-making software. On this slide, you should use text and visuals so that someone who does not know anything about your assignment is able to grasp the most important takeaways, i.e. conclusions, of your work.

Format: It should be horizontally aligned (landscape). In this summary slide, assume that your audience is an educated one, but does not really know anything about the topic.

Things to include in the slide:

• limited text, preferably bullet points and in a legible font
• a basic explanation for the choice of the materials you worked with
• reflections on the process
• any major conclusions
• a few representative images
• your name(s), the name of the course and the semester
• the NYU Abu Dhabi logo (download from the intranet)

Save it in two formats:

• a editable file as well as a pdf and placed in your assets folder.

Name your file “SummarySlide{yourinitials}yes/no].pdf”. Yes here indicates that you are ok if your instructor were to reuse this slide in a public exhibition of student work. No indicates you prefer not. Your choice of yes or no will not affect your grade. Please make sure that you check with your partner for the assignment before indicating “yes”

NB: This exercise is a great first step to learning how to make a poster for presentation–a requirement for many capstones. You can refer to these “design hacks” for making a poster prepared for a capstone by NYUAD faculty member Erin Collins.

“Unproject” Plan (15%)

You may do this assignment alone or in pairs. The point of this final “unproject” is to have you put together the pieces of the course: the kinds of data, the forms of analysis or treatment of the data and the ways of communicating the data to different audiences. You do not have to use or refer to real data, just indicate in the plan if you are making reference to unreal archives.

A good model for your unproject are the examples in Digital_Humanities (MIT, 2017), pp 60-71, A Portfolio of Case Studies. You do not need to write up the project in complex prose. Instead, you can cover the essentials of this imagined project on separate slides. Consider using the following breakdown. Each slide can have a few bullet points and an image.

• Scope: What is the project’s main focus, and what specific aspects does it explore?
• Data: What are the data of your project? Where do they come from? How will they be sourced? collected? digitized? organized? Are there ethical issues with the data?
• Techniques: What methods or approaches does the project employ (e.g., digitization, computer vision, text analysis or generation, data-mining, crowdsourcing/participatory architecture, image classification or generation)?
• Aims: What are the project’s main objectives or goals? What do you hope to do with the data? Do you have any hypotheses about how they will be “useful”?
• Values & Ethics: What kinds of values or ethics guide your project?
• Resources: What kinds of resources do you require to carry out your project? What tools or technologies are utilized in the project (e.g., natural language processing, cartographic representations, 3d printing, large language models, AI)? Who are the people going to be who participate in your project?
• Workplan: How does the project outline the steps to achieve its goals, and what plans are in place for dissemination and participation? Are there phases to the project?

Use images in your unproject plan. They can come from rights-free images, a place like unsplash, or they can be AI-generated (Dalle, dreamstudio, diffusion B, Lexica, Craiyon). Best is to put the images in your assets folder and point to them in your presentation.

Ideas for the unproject:

• an analysis of themes in 20 years of your hometown local newspaper
• mapping sites of encounter for a community you know well
• digital reunification of lost cultural objects on a large scale
• documenting collective memory of an event or community
• analyze the film archive of your country over a 50 year period
• etc.

Format for presenting your unproject: For convenience, you can use Google Slides or any other presentation making software you prefer. Have a draft of these slides for our presentation day on Tues & Thurs 12 and 14 December.

All work is due 15 December, 12 noon, unless you have worked out another deadline with the instructor.

You are free at the end of the course to delete your Github Pages site. Please, however, do not do so before receiving your final grade in Albert.