Donald Byrd, rev. mid-Nov. 2006

In general, I'll use the same criteria to grade your project papers and your presentations in class. The four criteria are of about equal importance; they are:

1. Clarity. The more clear and easily understandable the product (either paper or presentation) is, the higher the grade will be. This is partly, though by no means completely, a matter of good writing style; see below for details.

2. Justification of claims. This is an important aspect of the "scientific method". You may well claim that your redesigned user interface is better than the one you started with, or that tuba players hear melodies differently from trumpet players. The more consistently I feel any such claims you make are justified, the higher the grade. Ordinarily, you should justify any claims you make that aren't obvious by citing some kind of evidence in their favor. However, an annotated bibliography is a special case here. An annotated bibliography should have only a few sentences on each paper: that’s not much room to justify anything, so, in this case, I’ll generally accept claims (e.g., how good, bad, readable, or incomprehensible a paper is) without specific justification–though it’ll still depend on how reasonable the claim seems to me.

3. Interest. The more interesting the product, the higher the grade. An important source of interest in any research report (including yours) is connections to other work in the field. Specifically, the more connections you draw between your work and other work on music representation and searching, and the more interesting I find the connections, the better.

A factor that very occasionally has a great effect on interest–for either a paper or a live presentation–is significance of results. As an extreme example, if you come up with something that might really have a noticable effect on the field of music informatics, you'll get an A+ for the product, even if you don’t do well on the other criteria. Of course, the vast majority of student papers and presentations are of no significance at all other than educational.

Obviously there are additional factors that make a live presentation interesting; see below for more on this.

4. Professionalism. Adherence to an appropriate standard of style in terms of formatting in general, bibliographic format, etc. See below for more on this.

Finally, I will take into account the difficulty of the project in grading: if, in my opinion, your project is particularly difficult, I’ll be more lenient.

Clarity in presenting information graphically is important in technical writing, and even more important in technical presentations. For help with this, there are several extraordinary books by Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information; Envisioning Information; and Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. There's a fair amount of overlap among them, though the first concentrates on displaying information that's basically numerical, the others more on information of other kinds. Envisioning Information discusses music notation very briefly, dance notation in some depth. Visual Explanations includes a description of how a last-ditch effort by well-meaning engineers to stop the doomed 1986 launch of the space shuttle Challenger failed, with a fascinating and convincing argument that a single well-designed chart (which Tufte shows) would have made the difference to the officials who decided to ignore their warnings and proceed.

Clarity. An excellent guide to quality writing is Strunk and White’s classic little book, The Elements of Style; it’s easily available in bookstores and libraries. Also, the Common Errors in English web site is very useful. However, be aware that neither focuses on technical writing. Also, Strunk and White has its flaws. It has an overly-authoritarian style, and -- worse -- an old-fashioned attitude that sexist language like using "he" and "man" generically for people of unknown gender is just fine. There's significant research indicating that that type of usage makes a real difference in a reader's mind, whether they're aware of it or not. (Details available from me on request.)

Two items that might affect your grade either on clarity or on professionalism are (1) using proper grammar -- both the Strunk and White book and the Common Errors web site cover this to some extent; and (2) the very basic idea that anything you turn in should have its pages numbered and stapled. (I mention this for a reason, and you know you are.) I'm flexible about grammar: for example, I don't object to sentence fragments where there's a reason for them (e.g., in an annotated bibliography, again, where terseness is valuable). And I sometimes start sentences with "and" myself :-) . But I'm not flexible about numbering and stapling together your pages! The only exception would be a case where you're turning in just a few pages, they're independent, and each is labelled.

Professionalism. Another very basic thing is correct spelling; misspelled words can certainly affect clarity, but it's more a matter of professionalism.

With respect to general style and formatting, bibliographic and citation format, etc., any well-thought-out style, used consistently, is okay. However, I suggest you find out what style is most common in publications in your area and use that! And an easy way to find out what style might be to ask your major professor. But I’d also be happy with the American Psychological Association (APA) style. In any case, all works cited must appear in the list of references. Exception: very few style guidelines pay much attention to musical works, which are significantly different from other types of works. If you want to mention Beethoven piano sonatas or recordings by Omara Portuondo, you can use my own Bibliographic Style Guidelines for Music, or the style described on the IU Music Library web site. As my Guidelines say, musical works need not be listed in the references.

A good summary of the APA style is available, from a journal that uses that style. From that page, click on "Guide for Authors". Also see the APA's own "Style Tips". The Byrd and Crawford paper "Problems of Music Information Retrieval in the Real World" follows the APA style, so you can use it as a model. Finally, in the unlikely case those sources aren’t enough, APA publishes a 400-page Publication Manual, which is available in several IU Bloomington Libraries; get the fifth edition, the current one, if possible.

Organization has a major effect on clarity and professionalism; content has a major effect on justification of claims and interest.

There are several types of technical papers: among them are survey papers, original research papers, tutorials, and position papers. Of course, some don't fit neatly in any category. Your project report will probably be closest to the "original research" category. This type of paper would usually (1) give some motivation for the work (why is the problem the paper is about interesting or significant and/or who work on the problem is likely to benefit); (2) talk about previous work on the problem; (3) say what this paper's author(s) decided to do; (4) say what the author(s)' results were; (5) draw conclusions from those results; and (6) talk about what research still needs to be done on the topic. All of this is as specific as possible! And, of course, every technical paper has a title and a list of references, and most have acknowledgements of people who helped in one way or another.

Project Proposals. Proposals, including project proposals, are a special case. In this case, you couldn't do #4, 5, or 6 yet, of course, and I wouldn't expect you to do #2 -- though if you can include a few sentences about previous work, go for it! You can and should do #1, and you can and should do #3 (written in future tense, obviously). You should also have a title and, if at all possible, a reference or three. And be as specific as possible; a few numbers can be very helpful in giving a reader (me) an idea of the scope of what you're proposing, even if the numbers are just educated guesses -- which, realistically, is probably all they can be anyway. Why references in a proposal? One reason is to reassure a reader that you already know enough about the problem you're tackling that your proposal is likely to be at least halfway reasonable. References can also suggest how you're thinking about the problem, if the reader is familiar with them. If you include #2 (discussion of previous work), include references for your sources.

Clarity and Interest. The most important, and perhaps the most often-neglected, things in a presentation are (1) that it be easily understood by your audience, and (2) that it be interesting to them. A great way to both help understandability and add interest is to use lots of pictures and diagrams and, for presentations about music, audio examples. (My own lectures are, I’m afraid, barely adequate in this respect.) Furthermore, the amount of time you have for your presentation is at all limiting for the complexity of your subject -- and it probably is -- well-chosen images and sounds can save a tremendous amount of presentation time (at the expense of time preparing the presentation). Of course the pictures, diagrams, and audio examples must be well-chosen; otherwise they may confuse more than they help. Again, Tufte's books described above are superb.

If the content of your talk is way over your audience's head, they're not going to understand, no matter how good your presentation! You may feel you have no choice, perhaps because you're presenting a very technical paper to a non-technical audience, but there's a good chance you can avoid the problem. Is it really essential to present the more technical parts of the paper? Often the answer is no: you can give people the main ideas of the paper, sometimes even the main ideas of the difficult sections, without going into detail. An outstanding example of achieving a high degree of clarity and interest via images and sounds is the video about sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! on its Web site (http://www.popmodernism.org/scrambledhackz/), which conveys the nontrivial ideas behind audio mosaicing in a remarkably clear way.

Clarity and Professionalism. It's very desirable that you give your audience, in visual form, a way to organize the talk. Just showing them a series of images -- even if they're web pages that are designed to stand by themselves -- and talking about them is not ideal. It's better to have "slides" (in a very loose sense of the word) that say something about the images, and to use these slides as a point of departure for the images you really want to show your audience. Note that PowerPoint (for example) slides can have links on them, so you can do this very easily during your talk, and anyone you give your PowerPoint file to can do the same thing later. Of course the slides can actually contain the images. And of course web pages can also have links on them!: you can use a web page or series of web pages of your own instead of a PowerPoint presentation.

[NOTE: I just discovered that the website the following paragraph refers to no longer exists! If anyone knows of anything similar, please tell me. In the meantime, even though you can't see it, my comments on colors and font sizes should be helpful.] An excellent, common-sense set of guidelines for actually delivering a presentation is James Allan and Bruce Donald's How to give a talk. However, I don't completely agree with them on everything. They say "Use color...Use several different colors." Okay, but don't use color just for the sake of using color; find a way to use it that makes things clearer, or at least that isn't distracting! And don't use large, garish areas of strongly-contrasting colors like red and blue unless you want to nauseate as well as distract your audience. They also say "Use large fonts. Anything smaller than 24 point is probably a mistake." The principle is a good one, but that number is a bit too high; 20-point is fine, at least with a small audience. In addition, some of what they say is obviously aimed at older technology like overhead projectors and simply doesn't apply to computer-based presentations.

What computer will you use?A final piece of advice. It's tempting to use your own familiar laptop to give a presentation instead of a "generic" computer in our classroom, and if you're doing anything esoteric, that may be a good idea: your unusual programs may not work properly on another computer. But if you're just using routine software like PowerPoint and a web browser, using a computer that's already set up and working avoids problems with audio and, especially, video connections that can be disasterous! The safest thing is to try your presentation (or a rough version of it) on the regular computer enough ahead of time that you can do something about it if there are serious problems.