Software Project and written submission: digital media (822P4)

60 credits, Level 7 (Masters)

All year

The practical project and written submission combines practice and theory in digital media. The requirement is for a practical project demonstrating digital media practice plus a 9,000 word extended essay. Through a combination of workshops, tutorials, project proposal development, and a work in progress conference the module enables you to develop an area of practice and to explore what they want to make and why.

The module supports you to develop the following:

• Research your topic and ideas
• Develop your initial ideas by reading about connected examples and critical work on the themes that you are looking at
• Look at other examples of practice with links to your own ideas
• Identify skills, materials, work process and timetable
• Is it doable? Is it coherent?
• Make a clear and realistic production plan and develop your work in relation to this
• Collect all the materials for submission together and decide how you are going to present these in a user friendly way
• Try out your practice on other people - can they access it, does it work in the ways that you intended make sure that you user-test the project and incorporate feedback

The accompanying written submission allows you to examine the theoretical questions that are suggested by the practical project. This project is the case study for an extended critical essay. Projects might examine questions about networked identity, interactivity, augmentation, memory, or digital methods and mapping, for example.

Questions include: does it demonstrate anything or experiment with anything? Does it throw up new research in the field of digital media? Develop your ideas into a structured and well informed argument that draws on the practical project as a case study or research.

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 600 hours of work. This breaks down into about 17 hours of contact time and about 583 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2020/21. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum. We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.