---
title: Content Creation Assignment
tags: assignment
---

<span style="font-size: 50px;">**Content Creation Assignment**</span>
<span style="font-size: 30px; font-weight: 700;">
Using Dash to Build a Hypermedia Narrative
</span>

:::info
**Released: September 21st, 6:00pm ET**

**Due: October 5th 11:59pm ET**
:::

# Introduction

The purpose of this assignment is twofold: first to introduce you to a modern hypermedia system, Dash, built on the MERN stack, by having you **construct a hypermedia corpus**, and second, to have you build an interesting narrative trail à la Bush through that corpus using “Dash Presentation Trails”.

This assignment has a lot of freedom and will require some creativity on your part -- think of it as a creative writing assignment using hypermedia rather than a pure text-only document. We suggest you build the assignment around a hobby, a course, or set of courses, i.e., some topic or project that interests you - it could be donuts 🍩.

<div style="text-align:center; margin-bottom: 20px;"><img style="border-radius:5px;" src="https://i.imgur.com/QyQJdJY.png" /></div>

**Think of an interesting story/narrative** that you want to tell using a hypertext corpus where you will use both **free-form exploration** (i.e. panning/zooming over the workspace, scrolling text-based documents, following links, etc.) and **guided exploration** using a presentation trail which lets you define and sequence through particular points of view on your corpus as a sequence of snapshots/slides. The presentation trail provides a “backbone” of a guided tour, but the viewer is free to wander and explore the corpus at will, and then resume the tour. Think of a guided museum tour but with the freedom to wander to other rooms not explicitly on the main tour and then resume the tour where you left off.

Your chosen story/narrative should inform which media documents you want to import or drag in from the Web to support your story, and what RTF text notes of your own are that you want to add (e.g. summaries, commentary, explanations, sources, etc). Your narrative needn’t be long -- the hypermedia equivalent of a “short story” rather than a novel. **The whole experience should be 5-8 minutes** -- we just want you to get a taste of both Dash and the idea of this form of Bush-style narrative based on a hypermedia corpus. (Of course, after you’ve done the basic assignment well, we’d love you to read about additional features and create a more interesting corpus and narrative, but it isn’t necessary for the assignment.)

:::info
The Dash team members will help you through these issues. We are only introducing you to the basic features of Dash, though we encourage you to explore its more advanced features time permitting.
:::

## Building the corpus
Here are the three parts of the assignment.
:::success
**1. Build the corpus**
a. Familiarize yourself with the general facilities of Dash by watching the short set of Overview Videos available [**here**](https://brown-dash.github.io/Dash-Documentation/videos/). Some precise interactions/UIs may not be fully up-to-date but they will give you the flavor of Dash. The details of the assignment will teach you the Dash basics. Also, the Features Documentation is available for more details on features, especially ones you won’t need for the assignment.

b. To build the corpus, import a variety of media of your choice. In general we expect some PDFs, websites, and your own RTF text documents (serving as summaries, annotations, directions, observations, etc.), as well as images (in common formats such as jpg, png, and gif) and videos (in common formats such as mov, mp4, mpeg, and Youtube videos).

c. Of course, do not solely use plain RTF texts, images, and PDFs! Try to incorporate more things like links and annotations to show interactions and relationships between various documents.
:::

## Creating your trail
It is probably a good idea to watch Example Narratives before reading the rest of the assignment to get a better understanding of the final deliverable. You can view the example narratives [here](#Example-Narratives).

2. **Build one (or more, if you’re ambitious) trail(s) through selected items in your corpus** that you can narrate using Presentation Trails. Use this to develop your narrative but keep in mind that your guided tour can be stopped for free-form exploration at any time.

## Presenting
3. **Make a 5-8 minute video of your hypermedia narrative and upload it to YouTube.**

We will choose a few students to present their presentation trails at the beginning of class. We will Slack you before class to let you know if you will be presenting.

# Dash Basics
Go to https://browndash.com/signup to create an account. Once you have created your account you will be able to access Dash from any device with the email address and password you specified.

*Some things to keep in mind before and while working with Dash:*

1. Dash comes equipped with editors for a variety of documents. Documents can range from images, PDFs, to an entire collection.
2. The Dash user model is made up of Dash documents and nested collections of documents and/or sub-collections laid out on a 2D unbounded canvas which users can freely pan and zoom. Users can include documents into sub-collections to express spatial or hierarchical structures, as well as create links between documents to express additional relationships. Dash also supports a number of different views of a collection of documents, called perspectives (e.g, schema and grid perspective), but you don’t need to use more than the free-form layout perspective for the assignment. Think of the free-form perspective, the documents, and the collections as a fluid, flexible, feature-rich example of what the 40-year-old desktop/document/folder metaphor could become.
3. RTF text documents are used for annotations or to relate two or more other types of documents as the connector explaining the relationships, with links to those related documents.
4. Dash contains a built-in tiled window manager that mimics what a browser like Chrome provides. Tabs are similar to browser tabs in that multiple tabs can be opened at the same time. Tiles are similar to browser windows in that adjacent tiles can share the Dash canvas real estate, which corresponds to opening multiple browser windows that share the computer screen real estate. For this assignment you may only need a single tile, and possibly only one tab for one outer collection, but feel free to play around with your layouts. The arrangement of tiles and tabs is called a dashboard and in general you might have multiple ones; you only need one for this assignment
5. Documents are never deleted in Dash! However, you can close a document to remove it from your current view. Closed documents can be found and brought back to view through the “Recently closed” flyout panel (explained in the section below).
6. Presentation trails are a way of showing a guided tour of “waystations” (i.e. particular views over the outer collection or any of its components). Think of Presentation Trails as a cross between Powerpoint and Prezi with (currently) less support for fancy types of path-based animations than Powerpoint has, but with the great advantage of allowing free-form exploration to be freely mixed with the guided tour.

## Do’s & Don’ts

### Do’s
- Be patient! Sometimes the system is slow, especially on importing large PDFs, videos.
- Document weird/unexpected behaviors using the `Bug Report` so we can fix it and make it an easier experience! This will be enormously helpful to the Dash team.
- Refresh the browser often. This will restore your corpus to a pristine state and can sometimes fix any weird/unexpected behaviors you encounter.

:::info
Note: Refreshing will cause you to lose the undo/redo stack from the prior session
:::

### Don'ts

- Hesitate to ask questions!

# Example Narratives
Make sure to watch the following videos to get an idea of what it means to build a Hypermedia Narrative. Remember that these are just examples to help you get an idea of what a narrative could look like, not what it should look like!

1. [Rosemary’s Dash Hypermedia Narrative on **Poetry**
](https://youtu.be/tuIEWUKxXJQ)
2. [Geireann’s Dash Hypermedia Narrative on **The “British” Museum**
](https://youtu.be/vm4e6r8M5xo)
Although Rosemary and Geireann both refer to features of Dash, this is only for demonstrative purposes, the focus of your voice-over should be your narrative!

# Final Handin

Make a 5-8 minute screen recording with voiceover introducing and showing your hypertext narrative. Upload your video as unlisted or public to YouTube and submit the link in [this form](https://forms.gle/e7e1UJVF7nfsxCxi6).

# In-Class Presentations

We will choose a few students to present their presentation trails at the beginning of class. We will Slack you before class to let you know if you will be presenting.

# Grading

This is a very open-ended assignment and some of you will be more creative than others; we will look for a baseline of effort and use a very simple ABC/NC grading scheme. At a minimum, we expect you to make use of:
- PDFs
- Images
- RTF Text nodes
- Links between documents
- Embedding text annotations on PDFs using the PDF margin
- Nested collections

Also try to incorporate the following:
- Embedding marquee selections on PDFs
- Embedding text annotations and marquee selections on images
- Linking between parts of documents, between an entire document to part of another document, etc.
- Pin with view for your slides
- Various Movements and Visibility & Duration options

In addition, please make sure all the documents in your corpus and all the slides in your presentation trail **fit into your narrative**. Place quality over quantity - that is, don’t simply make documents for the sake of numbers.

Overall, we are not expecting masterworks, but something representing some thoughts and execution, taking, from start to finish, less than 8 hours including learning the basics of Dash. We can't wait to see how you use it!