Well begun is half done. A good beginning makes a good ending. We are all familiar with such proverbs. In this milestone, you'll try to make a good start to your project in order to set up the foundations for its success. You will decide on a topic of research (inspired by our list of possible topics), look for literature (text, video, audio, etc.) about this topic, generate a list of questions you want to answer about this topic on your website, and draw a sketch for how you'll organize the information in the website.
The purpose for this project is for you to strive to make the answers to your questions relevant to online users, by bringing your scholarship to the web, and communicating it in a way that leads people to want to engage more with it. We are emphasizing "strive", because in these times, thanks to the proliferation of user-generated content on social media, it's really challenging to get people to pay attention to a scholarly topic for more than a few seconds. But, by striving, you will be learning so much, and then take what you learn from your efforts to your next project, and so on. The Web is where most of our recently created collective human knowledge lives nowadays, and in this project you will learn how to generate knowledge for the Web and how to use Web technologies to share it.
In this milestone, you will create and submit two files and a subfolder for
images, all stored together in the folder pm1. When ready, you will
upload pm1 in the cs115-project folder in
your CS server account. Here is a short summary (explained in more details later):
To visit the page on the browser, you need to be using Wellesley's VPN. Later in the term, we'll remove the restrictions, and make your pages visible to everyone on the Web.
There are a few related goals for this milestone: a) find a topic you want to research; b) formulate specific research questions; c) find references that will help you generate the content for your website; and d) make an initial plan for what you will put on the website (draw sketches).
The first three steps (find a topic, formulate questions, find references) are in "conversation" with one another. You might need to read/skim some articles first, before settling on your topic, or identifying the most interesting research questions. As you do your research, you might discover that there isn't much about your topic--both in terms of scholarly research or journalistic coverage. In that case, you should pause and ask yourself why. Try to expand your topic, in order to find more valuable information to write about.
Our librarian, Sarah Barbrow, has created a very useful research guide to help you get started. Make use of it and let Sarah know of new resources that you think should be included in it. Another great resource that you should consider is the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive. If you are interested in how things have changed in the past 20-30 years, you can use the Wayback machine to access archived versions of many websites.
One important goal for your research should be to get historical context about the topic. Technology doesn't develop in a vacuum, it's a process that both leverages and unleashes various forces: financial, political, societal, individual, and these all are tied to particular historical moments. For example, the aftermath of the dot-com bubble in 2001 affected Google's decision-making about how to monetize user search logs.
Our theme for this term is "the good, the bad, the ugly of the online platforms". Online platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook are currently the most profitable companies on the planet and their founders are the richest people on the world. While their products have brought us lots of convience in our lives, the power these companies yield is also immense. Their focus on prioritizing profit over fairness, transparency, and quality has make them subject of a lot of criticism, as we have been reading during Week 2. In your project, you can dig deeper to learn more about the
There are countless topics that one can think of in the context of our theme. Here is just a subset to get you thinking, I'm sure that based on the reading and discussions from Week 2, you will come up with a topic that fits your interests:
These topics are only suggestions to stimulate your thinking. As long as your chosen topic is within the broad theme of "the good, the bad, the ugly of the online platforms" then, it is a topic relevant to our class. If you have difficulty coming up with a topic, or narrowing it down, visit the instructor's office hours.
Once you have a topic, google for it to try to find information. Read Wikipedia articles (and visit the citation links) and search in the resources provided in our research guide. Your goal is to find information from a variety of voices and perspectives, for example:
Given the various formats that exist on the Web, you can also look for videos, podcasts (e.g., Sway with Kara Swisher, who interviews CEOs of tech companies), interactive websites, as long as you can verify their authorship (you don't want to fall for misleading sources).
For this milestone, you should try to collect as much information you can, even though you'll not be able to read it all this time around. As a minimum, you should have at least 10 links to various meaningful resources, on which you can rely during PM2 to start writing the content for your website.
Now that you have a sense of the kind of information that there is out there about your topic, you should make a first sketch of how you want your website to look like. You have visited thousands of websites in your life, you probably have some favorites in terms of aesthetics. Having a sense of how you want to organize your content, will help with your writing. Here are some examples of website sketches. You can do decide for your website to be a single page, or a hub (one main page, with linked pages from it). Some examples of website design templates can be found in the W3Schools website.
Your goal is to sketch one or two designs with some explanations. You can do these by hand and then take photos of the result, or using graphics tools such as Photoshop, InDesign, Google Drawing, etc.
Your design can change over time, but this is a good excercise to focus your work for the next weeks. You will be allowed to use the CSS templates from the examples in W3Schools website (if you choose to do so), thus, it's okay if you take them as a starting point for your sketches.
You will create an HTML document to record all steps that you performed in the previous section.
Here is what the document should contain:
Here is the template for how to organize your references based on what category they fall. Remember, we want diversity of sources.
This page will be titled pm1_proposal.html, it will link to the external CSS stylesheet you will create, and be stored in the folder cs115_project.
During the term, you will be writing a few documents about the project milestones. (These are not the website; they showcase the process that is leading toward your website.) It is thus important that these documents are well formatted and easy to read. Create a CSS external stylesheet that can be used to format the milestone documents you will be submitting. Choose a style that is appropriate to the content you're conveying. Here are examples of PM1 proposal documents from students from Spring 2021 T3:
Your CSS file should be named pmstyle.css, to indicate that is being used for the project milestone documents.
This milestone counts for 6 points (out of 40 for the whole project).
Here is a list of what we will consider in our grading:
I will try my best to give you feedback before the next project milestone is due.