Final Project Presentation Guidelines

Assignment Outline

Your final presentation is worth 15% of your final grade. Presentations should be 15-20 minutes for individuals or 20-25 minutes for groups, and unlike the initial demo this presentation should present a narrative structured around your research question (rather than you experience doing the research.)

You should begin with an introduction to your question and why it is of interest or significance. Then you should explain the rationale for dataset selection, as well as how you obtained the data. You should include a discussion of what did or did not work, and how you shifted your question based on the data available.

Then you should introduce the methods you decided to use (explain relevant background concepts if you are using more complex methods) and your rationale for selecting them. Finally you should discuss your results. What did you expect to find? Was there anything surprising or was everything expected? What would future research questions explore? How has this changed your understanding of this topic? This section should include at least one visualization, but remember that the best interpretations usually present data through multiple visualizations.

You also need to bring in some of the topics we’ve discussed over the course of the semester and include some mention of how your project might this be relevant to digital humanities (not necessarily research questions, but maybe in terms of methods or datasets).

You do not need to follow the order of these guidelines in terms of how you structure your presentation. Also you can use slides, Jupyter notebooks, or any other documents to present your materials.

Assignment Submission

Given time constraints, all presentations will be recorded and shared with the instructor.

We will follow similar instructions for the project update presentation, where you will start a Zoom session and record yourself. When recording, select the cloud option rather than local recording.

Once completed you will go to your Zoom profile in the browser and find your recording under Cloud Recordings.

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Unlike for the project update presentation, you will need to share your video via the Illinois Mediaspace, which you can follow instructions here http://publish.illinois.edu/business-elearn-tutorials/live-sessions-academy/recording-saving-and-publishing-a-live-session/.

That is because I will be sharing your videos, along with your final project posts on our course website. To that end, please feel free to give your presentation or project a title.

Assignment Rubric

A/A+ Presentations

• Presenters clearly outline the research question and why the presenters think it is significant, and tie their question to digital humanities research.
• Presenters thoroughly explain their dataset(s), including what it contains and what might be missing, as well as how you obtained the data. Presentations discuss any efforts at getting data that failed and how the presenters pivoted to other datasets or research questions.
• Presenters explain their methods including rationale and how it works. This could include diagrams for more complex methods.
• Presenters discuss their results and how it answers or doesn’t their initial research question. Presenters detail what they think their results represent, and whether what they found was surprising or expected.
• Presentations include a number of visualizations that support the results and display multiple facets of the data.
• Finally presenters detail how their understanding of this topic changed over the course of the project and what future research would like on this project.
• A+ presentations are ones that go beyond the criteria listed here in some manner.

A-/B+

• Presenters outline the research question and mention why the presenters think it is significant.
• Presenters explain their dataset but fail to mention what is missing or don’t provide details on how it was obtained. Presenters do detail whether they pivoted to other datasets.
• Presenters explain their methods including rationale but do not explain how it works.
• Presenters discuss their results and how it answers or doesn’t their initial research question. Presenters discuss what they found was surprising or expected.
• Presentations include at least 3 visualizations that support the results.
• Finally presenters mention how their understanding of this topic changed over the course of the project but lack details on what future research would like on this project.

B/B-

• Presenters outline the research question but do not mention why they think it is significant.
• Presenters explain their dataset but have yet to finish collecting their data and lack details on what it contains.
• Presenters explain their methods but do not include any rationale.
• Presenters discuss their results but struggle to relate it to their initial research question. Presenters discuss what they found was surprising or expected.
• Presentations have few or no visualizations that support the results.
• Finally presenters mention how their understanding of this topic changed over the course of the project but no mention of what future research would like on this project.

C+ or below

• Presenters outline the basics of their project, but lack meaningful details.
• Presenters have yet to make much progress on their final project.
• Presenters lack any direction on completing their project.