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Running notes on the research paper. Note that all of this is malleable and up for discussion!

Essentials

The paper should be 4000-5000 words. The paper should be about your project (and the process of making your project) and should “focus on at least one aspect of the interactive project: e.g. culture, theory, philosophy, or history, the project context, and/or production methods.”

Your goal with this paper is to describe your project with as much clarity, succinctness and rigor as possible. Your goal is not (necessarily) to create a compelling, convincing or beautiful piece of writing, though I find that having a clear description of your project is often the first step toward being able to write about your project in other styles and contexts and for different audiences.

You’re welcome to format your paper as you please, as long as the format is readable. Your citation style should be consistent throughout the paper.

Sections of the paper

Every Capstone paper will be different (and I’m open to radically different ideas about what a paper is and how it should work!), but these are the components that I suspect most papers will have in common:

• Abstract. This consists of about one sentence for each of: what you did, why you did it, how you did it, what the outcome was, why that outcome is significant.
• Introduction. This section “unpacks” the content of the abstract and sets out how the paper will work and what the reader can expect.
• Related work. Give the highlights from your annotated bibliography. Situate your work in a field of practice and contrast your project and methodology with similar work in that field.
• Methodology. This is the biggest chunk of the paper, and will likely have multiple subsections. Describe what you did! Talk about your criteria for success and your methods for meeting them.
• Evaluation. In this section, show how you determined whether or not the project achieved the goal. Depending on your project, this might be a quantitative evaluation, case studies, interviews, reflections, analyses, etc.
• Conclusion. Wrap up the paper, summarizing the project and the strengths and limitations of your methodology. Re-assert the context of your work and Outline directions for future research.

A few examples

Here are some papers to glance at as examples of what your paper might look like. In particular, these are papers about projects that the authors made. Not all of them have exactly the same structure as what I’ve outlined above, and they weren’t selected based on any rigorous criteria (they’re just the first ones I could find. Furthermore, not all of these are the same scope as the paper you’re writing! Some are bigger, some are smaller.

• RiTa: Creativity Support for Computational Literature (Daniel C. Howe)
• The Table is The Score: An Augmented-Reality Interface for Real-Time, Tangible, Spectrographic Performance (Golan Levin)
• Project Sidewalk: A Web-based Crowdsourcing Tool for Collecting Sidewalk Accessibility Data At Scale (best paper winner at CHI ’19)
• The Many Authors of The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex: Authorship, Agency, and Appropriation
• Hafez: an Interactive Poetry Generation System (Ghazvininejad et al)
• I wrote this paper about the Nonsense Laboratory with my collaborators. The paper was accepted but guess what criticisms the peer reviewers had for it!
• ISEA 2020 Proceedings (warning, unwieldy 33MB PDF!) Look especially for papers about art/design projects with “Evaluation” sections. The “NEO//QAB” paper is a good one to look at!