To keep up with this class, you must work on exercises regularly. Each day will involve some small assignment, to prepare you for the next of class, and to help you to build your course project. Students must complete on time at least 90% of all assigned homework exercises in order to pass the course. For students who complete the 90% requirement, the homework taken all together, is worth 30% of your course grade.

Coding and programming in real life is a social activity, and professionals in the real world aren’t “know-it-all” experts who work alone, but rather are tuned into discussion boards and regularly ask and answer questions to stay sharp and to learn from their community. In this class, we want you to work together and talk to each other and your instructors as your community resource, so we have built this into our course participation grade as a formal expectation. Beginning by week two, we’ll expect each student to post at least once per week on our course GitHub repo, and we strongly encourage you to do more than this minimum. Earn an A in participation by asking questions, making suggestions, and sharing helpful resources you’ve found. Help each other out by trying to answer questions on GitHub (and read the instructor posts too as we wade in to help). Your instructors will likely be dominating the class time as we model concepts and methods, so the GitHub Issues board gives the students a good space to form into a coding community to help each other and reflect together. Also, if you have a question about an assignment, always think of our GitHub Issues board as your first resource to check for helpful hints and to post your questions, because others may have the same question and answers are best shared! Of course you may e-mail us, but we really prefer you go the discussion board first, and doing so is, after all, worth course credit as your participation grade.

As scheduled throughout the course there will be several (probably about five or six) tests on the various kinds of coding we are learning in the course, and we will drop the lowest grade. All but the first test will be take-home and assigned over a weekend. They are open-book, open notes, but they must be completed individually and are designed to demonstrate that you have learned from the class material, coding assignments, and posted solutions. Tests may resemble homework assignments, but unlike homework exercises, these are given letter grades. These are given grades because they are evaluative and involve demonstrating what you have learned after we have finished a coding unit.

Throughout the semester you will be working as part of a team on a course project. Early in the semester each student posts a proposal for a semester project to work with a text (or collection of texts) in the public domain and a set of research questions to explore in a coding project. Teams will form around a selection of these projects in mid-September and begin work, performing document analysis, developing and implementing a system of markup and project rules, marking up text following that system, writing programs to conduct research and create a resource to share on a public website you will develop together that represents your investigation and your conclusions. Each project team must meet regularly together and with a project mentor (one of the instructor team) outside of class for project planning and discussion. Each of the project components described below adds up to 40% of your grade for the course.

Grades for the course are calcuated and posted on Courseweb, and follow this standard scale: A: 93-100%, A-: 90-92%, B+: 87-89%, B: 83-86%, B-: 80-82%, C+: 77-79%, C: 73-76%, C-: 70-72%, D+: 67-69%, D: 60-66%, F: 59% and below. In taking the course on a S / NC (pass-fail) basis, students must earn a C to receive Satisfactory credit. We give G grades (incomplete) at our discretion and only in conformity with the University Registrar policy: http://www.registrar.pitt.edu/grades.html.

We strictly require your attendance, as it is not only a setback to yourself but to the entire class and the success of our projects if students are repeatedly absent. Students must attend at least 90% of our class meetings in order to pass the course (that is, a maximum of four absences for any reason). Late arrival—particularly a pattern of repeated late arrivals—may be counted as absences at our discretion. To be considered attending for a class period, you must be present in the classroom by the beginning of class and until class is dismissed. For your own sanity, do not miss two consecutive classes. If you are experiencing a genuine emergency or crisis, alert us and provide documentation. (We do not want you to attend class if you have a fever or flu-like symptoms! If you are a Greensburg student and wish to be excused from two or more consecutive class meetings due to your own documented illness, please contact one of the following: the Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs, Prof. Jackie Horrall (724-836-7482 or jhorrall at pitt.edu), our Campus Health Center (Pamela Reed, 724-836-9947 or pmr20 at pitt.edu), or the Director of Counseling, Gayle Pamerleau (gaylep at pitt.edu), who can then officially alert all of your professors.

Your daily homework for this course is time-sensitive! Coding assignments, response papers, and other homework exercises must be uploaded to CourseWeb (or to Box, or the Sandbox server as specified), by the date and time indicated by the instructors. Homework assignments will be posted online to our class website and linked from our schedule, so students who miss class are nevertheless expected to consult the schedule and submit assignments on time. Because we post and share answers to homework exercises after submission deadlines, we will not accept late homework submissions. In order to pass the course, students must submit at least 90% of the regular homework assignments, and complete at least 90% of the work in each component of the course.

Similarly, because we will be posting answers or sharing them in class, we do not give make-up examinations or allow people to write exams after the solutions are posted. However, we will drop your lowest exam score for the class, so that you may miss one exam without penalty.

Our class is fast paced, and requires that we all be making the best use we can of our in-person class sessions. Arriving late and leaving early disrupts the important collective mental activity of class. So does in-class texting and checking your cell phone. While class is in progress, talking disruptively, leaving the classroom, texting or using a cell phone or computer, reading a newspaper, or other distracting behavior will be actively discouraged, and may result in a deduction in your Participation grade. Please respect what we do in the classroom: attend class regularly, and come prepared to contribute your questions and ideas.

Each student is issued a University email address (username@pitt.edu) upon admission. This email address may be used by the University for official communication with students. Students are expected to read email sent to this account on a regular basis. Failure to read and react to University communications in a timely manner does not absolve the student from knowing and complying with the content of the communications. The University provides an email forwarding service that allows students to read their email via other service providers (e.g., Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo). Students who choose to forward their email from their pitt.edu address to another address do so at their own risk. If email is lost as a result of forwarding, it does not absolve the student from responding to official communications sent to their University email address. To forward email sent to your University account, go to http://accounts.pitt.edu, log into your account, click on Edit Forwarding Addresses, and follow the instructions on the page. Be sure to log out of your account when you have finished. (For the full Email Communication Policy, go to http://www.bc.pitt.edu/policies/policy/09/09-10-01.html.)

Source Citation and Plagiarism: One goal of our course is to reflect on how best to cite sources in digital contexts. We will consider how and why such citations differ from documenting printed texts. We will also consider the ease and frequency with which digital texts and graphics are plagiarized on the worldwide web, and discuss how the omission of source citations detracts from the authority of a digital information resource. We expect you to practice mindful source citation, and plagiarism on your part will have very serious consequences.

Representing the voice of another individual as your own voice constitutes plagiarism, however generous that person may be in “helping” you with an assignment. Turning in an assignment generated collectively under the name of a single individual is considered plagiarism. When instructed to collaborate on a project, project collaborators share collective authorship and should identify themselves directly as a team. To avoid plagiarism, cite your sources whenever you quote, paraphrase, or summarize material, or use digital images from any outside source (including websites, articles, books, course readings, Courseweb or GitHub postings, or someone else’s notes). When using the “copy” and “paste” features as you read and research, be sure that you are carefully marking that these passages are unprocessed from their source, so that you know to process it later. Forgetting to do so not only produces sloppy work but (whether you intended it or not) results in a false representation. As long as you make a good faith and clear effort to cite your sources, you will not be faulted for plagiarism, but your work will be penalized if citations are inaccurate, unclear, or lack important information.

That said, the coding and digital development we do encourages collaboration, and for that reason we adopt our colleague David Birnbaum's Collaboration policy, which specifies that students identify collaborators in a comment on submitted asignments and take care on projects that all students contribute equally (and no student is contributing excessively more than what everyone else has done). When joining a group homework session, always work on the assignment by yourself first so you can be an equal participant, and write up the assignment by yourself, after the session is over so you take care not to copy from the other students. While we want you to consult with each other, you are responsible for doing all your writing and coding by yourself, using your own words.

Plagiarism falsely represents another source’s words or ideas as your own, and, if you commit plagiarism in this course, you will receive a final course grade of F and, at Greensburg campus, be reported to the Vice President for Academic Affairs. At Greensburg campus, cheating on exams or exercises will also receive a final course grade of F and will be reported to the Vice President for Academic Affairs.

All Pitt students and instructors (from Pittsburgh and Greensburg) are required to observe the Dietrich School Academic Integrity guidelines, and violations of the Academic Integrity Code will be addressed according to those guidelines.

If you have a disability for which you are or may be requesting an accommodation, please contact both your instructor and the Director of the Learning Resources Center, Dr. Lou Ann Sears, Room 240 Millstein Library Building (724) 836-7098 (voice) or los3 at pitt.edu (e-mail). The Learning Resources Center will verify your disability and help to determine reasonable accommodations for this course.