Brief Project Descriptions for COM541: Information Structure and Retrieval

Ongoing Projects

• Delicious bookmarking: bookmark items of interest from the Web to your Delicious or other social bookmarking account. You should use the shared tag com541, plus any other relevant tags that describe the item. Especially good items that you think would be of enduring value to the course should be added to the Course Bibliography.

• Reading responses: Everyone must post a response to the non-technical reading (e.g., IAWWW and the readings from tech comm journals) each week before class meets. Responses should be substantive, and about 500 words long. Keep all of your responses on a single wiki page that uses your wiki name, e.g., JoeS would keep his at JoeSReadingResponses.

Both the Delicious bookmarking and reading responses figure in your course participation grade.

Major Projects

There are three major projects required for this class; you should take the guidelines below as only the most skeletal description of what the project might entail. You are strongly encouraged to modify the project to fit your own personal needs.

Also note that you should think about some set of documents, information, or data that you would like to work with over the entire course, for each project (which I'll refer to as your data set). For example, data from an empirical study you have conducted; a set of documents comprising a professional portfolio, masters project, or open source software documentation. Alternatively, rather than beginning from a data set that you already have in place, you might think of a set that you can simultaneously build (e.g., gathering all of the course descriptions and syllabi you can for the Tech Comm program at IIT).

Either way, the data set should be something that is personally or professionally meaningful to you, and that is more complex than, say, a list of your favorite colors.

• Project 1 (Complete Description): For Project 1, you will develop a well-formed XML document richly representing a unit of your data set.

• Project 2 (Complete Description): For Project 2, you will build a MySQL database that complements and extends your XML document from Project 1, and to which you can enter from your own customized XHTML-based forms and PHP scripts, and retrieve via PHP scripts and dynamic URLs using mod_rewrite.

• Project 3: The final project asks you to build working scripts that pull information out of your database in a consistent, customized, and structured way (through URLs), and then delivers it simultaneously to XHTML, and to one of the following: an InDesign document, a Flash movie, a PDF, or some other XML- and URL-capable delivery mechanism.

Written by You aren't allowed to read included page KarlShCard