CMPT 480 / 840 Accessible Computing

Project Analysis and Design

Due Date: 12:00 noon, Fri, Nov. 16

Analysis

Analysis involves getting a much deeper understanding of the various factors influencing your project than you did at the proposal stage. This involves identifying a larger number of sources of information. Whereas your proposal needed to identify 4 or 5 sources of information to ensure that your proposal was unique and feasible, your analysis should identify at least 12 - 20 sources of useful information that provides you with a sufficiently rich understanding of your topic to actually do a good project.

Whereas web sites were sufficient for your proposal, it is expected that you consult scholarly sources for your analysis. While other non-scholarly publication web sites may provide you with useful information, you should not rely solely on the information they provide or treat it as established fact (remember grade school children can create web pages).

The databases accessible through the UofS Library most likely to have material of interest to us are:

However, there may be other databases that provide more domain specific information that you should also consult. You may also use Google Scholar to try and find scholarly papers that relate to your project. In many cases you will then have to retrieve the papers they identify by going through the UofS Library's databases.

Please remember the guidelines on academic honesty and use proper attribution of ideas and sets of words that you have obtained from these sources. You will be rewarded (and never penalized) for appropriately using ideas that are properly attributed to others. You will be severely punished (the University could even expel you) if you commit plagiarism. As I indicate above, I expect that you identify and properly use with proper attributions ideas from a sufficiently wide range of authors.

A good analysis is more than just a set of jot notes and quotations. It needs to tell a story to the reader and show how the ideas go together. As you are conducting your research you should be organizing (and reorganizing as necessary) your ideas. They then need to be presented in a clear manner in an appropriate structure that helps convince the reader that you have gathered and that you understand these materials and that they can form the basis for your project.

Sometimes diagrams can help convey your meaning. If you choose to use them don't assume that the reader will understand the message you expect them to convey and just tell the reader to see figure X. Be sure to explain how the diagram illustrates the concepts that it is intended to illustrate.

Observe the rules of good writing. Each major section of your report should first introduce the reader as to what is coming, before dealing with ha bunch of details, and then should end with a summary that helps the reader to understand how the details have worked together to cover the topic of that section. It is expected that your writing is free of typos and grammatical errors. If necessary consult the office of the university that helps with writing or have some friend or family member proofread you report.

Professor Carter is willing to give you feedback on drafts of your report, provided that he have at least two days to look it over and that it is free of typos and grammatical errors. But he will not provide feedback on drafts in which he finds an excessive number of these types of errors.

Professor Carter is also willing to answer short e-mail questions that can be answered by short replies or to arrange a meeting to discuss more complicated issues.

Design

Design involves planning in detail how to solve the problem that you are investigating. For project that involve creating programs, this means developing sufficiently detailed design so that someone else could easily program the system. For projects that involve creating models, ontologies, methods, methodologies, procedures, etc. it means actually creating a first version along with a draft of the rules for its use (if applicable) and documenting the reasons involved in its creation.

Designs usually involve diagrams and accompanying explanations. Remember that your design also needs to be readable, so the considerations noted above for an analysis also apply.