Document+Machine

** Due: Noon, November 29th (no exceptions) ** //"Moby Dick is a novel that elevates the ordinary to the fantastic and brings down the fantastic to the ordinary. Even the industrial processing of whales becomes a chance for encyclopaedic description and poetic eulogy." – [|Chris Routeledge]//
 * CCT360: ‘Document Machine’ Final Assignment **
 * Assigned: November 1st **
 * Evaluation: 40% of final mark **
 * It is suggested you work in pairs, but working alone is permitted. **

**Overview: ** This semester we have spent an extended amount of time thinking about typography and page organization fundamentals. We started with a simple document, and then expanded our focus to ‘tune’ a WordPress theme to meet our needs. The second assignment was a trial by fire introduction to theming in WordPress, but it is hard to get invested in a web project when it is populated by placeholder content. The final exercise in CCT360 is a team-directed design experiment: translate a work of fiction into a WordPress site.

**Exercise: ** Select a work of public domain fiction that you find interesting/stimulating and where you have access to the entire text in a format that lends itself to cutting and pasting into WordPress. Develop a methodology for importing this content into WordPress and speculating how this work can be organized within the constraints of the CMS.

**Design Considerations ****:** There are a number of options for inputting a novel into WordPress. The most direct approach would be to plug the text into your site as posts in reverse chronological order. This isn’t that exciting but say if your novel was written in first person and you used (dated) passages as if they were blog posts you would really have to engage (even edit) the content to sort out a workflow. Alternatively, you might enter your novel into pages and then make extensive use of categories and taxonomy to provide non-linear means of navigating through the text. You might take a more graphic approach and try to integrate text and images as well – use your imagination! The more you invest yourself in your source novel, the easier it will be to develop a working methodology.

**Resources for online texts: ** [] , [|http://www.literaturepage.com]  & [|http://www.fullbooks.com] <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> – it will be far easier to find the text of fiction that is in the <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000099; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">[|public domain] <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. If you have a particular book in mind that you want to work with, and are ambitious/ingenious enough you will undoubtedly be able to track it down. //Choose something that interests you.//

**<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Getting Started: You cannot start working on this assignment in WordPress until you have received your evaluation for the 'Damage Control' Assignment **<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(expect this to be on or before November 8th), so <span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> focus on brainstorming and reading your book over the first week of the assignment. Once you've received an evaluation for the ~ccitXXX install you and your partner will use, you can begin. You will need to:
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If you want to archive your work take screen captures of the various pages on the site. (I recommend the Chrome extension [|Webpage Screenshot] - or [|Aviary] for Firefox )
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Remove the placeholder content from your 'damage control' assignment.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Deactivate the 'Esther Artistic Theme'.

<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//Once you have done these steps you can proceed...//

**<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Constraints: ** <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**Optional Content**: **<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Hints: **
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">All students must use the [|‘Room 34 Baseline’] <span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> theme as a starting point.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Remember the ‘card sort’ exercise (IA pg. 51)? Think about how you can use taxonomy and categories to sort the contents of your selected piece of fiction.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">You can use images as much as you feel is appropriate, but all images must be either self-generated or available for republication under a [|creative commons] <span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> license and credited/links provided to the appropriate photograher/artist. [for info on this requirement please see this reference page]
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Note the 'Critical Engagement with Source Text' section on the rubric – teams may create a page explaining their design rational to be taken into consideration during the evaluation process.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Spend time picking the right piece of fiction and take time to read it and think about how you might ‘take it apart’. This project will be much easier if you invest yourself in critically engaging your source text.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">To get started, prepare mockups on paper rather than on your live site – just keep the basic two column layout employed by the theme in mind.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Be strategic and think about a creative approach to handling your landing page. You might consider it a ‘switchboard’ or a ‘table of contents’
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This project isn’t necessarily all about text. With the right plugins, you might be able to use WordPress as a ‘graphic novel engine’ – you can work in this direction if you think it is appropriate.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Consult this reference document (discussed during the the November 1st class) – it will point to a range of plugins, widgets and approaches.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Remember, the main goal of this assignment is to make a cohesive document. Use the skills (and feedback) you’ve received from the first two assignments. In both cases, be sure to reference the examples posted on the course wiki.

**<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Submission Guidelines: **<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Email the instructor when you are complete at greg.smith1@sheridanc.on.ca and send along the URL your site is installed at. The assignment is not considered ‘complete’ until you’ve sent this notification message. Forgetting your cPanel or WordPress password is not grounds for an extension.



**<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Evaluation: **<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Note the above rubric. Marks will be awarded for final sites that are both readable and scannable, imaginative and ambitious and those that critically engage their source text. Marks will be deducted if the constraints listed above are not satisfied and assignments submitted that are based on themes other than 'Room 34 Baseline' will not be accepted. Projects that do not address the Creative Commons requirement will receive a 10% penalty. Assignments not received on November 29th will be considered late and subject to the late penalties described on the course outline. Assignments will receive a 0 if they are not submitted by December 6th.