Guidelines for WiP sessions

During the last weeks of class we will scrutinize drafts of your final research papers by having work-in-progress (WiP) seminars in which you present your own writing and review others' work.Identifying the highlights and weak links from others' papers should help you avoiding the pitfalls you may encounter when writing an academic paper. Please do not underestimate the importance of writing a high-quality paper, as the exam format of the course is: External examiner, 7-point marking scale, C1: Written work without oral exam.

Logistics

• You will be assigned into sessions on a specific day. See schedule.
• You are required to present once (A), review twice (B) and be an audience member many times (C).
• Two-hour sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays consisting of 30min slots, each split as follows:
  - 5 mins presenter (A)
  - 10mins reviewers (B, B)
  - 15 min plenary & audience questions (C).

Roles:

A (presenter)

• Submit the work-in-progress version of your term paper, written using the term paper template (RTF), to the course email list, in accordance to these deadlines:
  - For Tuesday sessions: 23:59 the preceding Thursday evening.
  - For Thursday sessions: 23:59 the preceding Monday evening .
• Please be on time with your submission to guarantee equal conditions for all.
• Present brief comments about your paper (5 min) on the assigned date (see presentation tips below) and be prepared to discuss it with the reviewers. No need to prepare a PPT.

B (reviewer)

• Make a printout of the submitted material, read it thoroughly, and bring to the session so you can talk specifics.
• Write a one-page review according to the guidelines (see below).
• Prepare a 5-minute oral presentation of your review (formal or less formal, up to you) and speak out in the assigned session. No need to prepare a PPT.
• Make a printout of your review to give to the author.

C (audience)

• Make a printout of the submitted material, read it thoroughly, and bring to the session so you can talk specifics.
• Formulate at least one focused question/comment per paper and speak out during the plenary discussion.

Presentation tips for the author
Do not worry or get stressed if you feel your paper is “not ready to be presented yet”. The sessions are called “work-in-progress seminars” because the baseline is that you present more or less unfinished work. However, as the end of the course is rather near already, you should at least put together and submit a paper with your core idea surrounded with motivation, preliminary analysis and some critical discussion, i.e. you should have alpha or beta version of the final argument. Rather than leaving out ideas because of the lack of time to unpack them in writing, you should put them in some condensed form, e.g. as bullet points, and deal them in more detail in your presentation.

As the others will have read your paper, your presentation doesn’t have to be a faithful summary of the paper’s contents and you should instead just provide some initial followup comments, framing, you want to kick things off with. You might, for example, flag an area of the argument or data you have been struggling with as a way of getting useful feedback.

Reviewer guidelines
Put this info on top of anything else:

Your Name, email address
Review of [Paper title] by [Author]

The 1-to-1½-page (12 pts, single spaced) review should begin with an original 100-200-word summary of the paper you’re reviewing. The summary should cover the topic area, goals, research questions, the theoretical background, analysis, and conclusions (where applicable). This is to ensure you read the paper thoroughly enough to give meaningful feedback.

The summary should be followed with critical and constructive comments, or, proposals for improvements regarding, but not limited to, the areas listed below. Whether you write full-fledged sentences or bullet points is up to you, as long as your thoughts can be understood.

Subject area & motivation:

• Does the paper provide adequate reasons why its topic is important?

Theoretical background & relevant past work:

• Do you know of some references the author should take into account or against which the paper could be judged?
• Is the theory presented in an understandable manner?
• Are concepts used without definitions or defined before being used?
• Does the paper convince you about the benefits of choosing the particular approach?

• Are the research questions presented in a compact and understandable manner?
• Do you think the research questions are in concert with the motivation, i.e. they can help solving the problem in question?

Empirical work / material

• Is the selection of empirical material sufficient?
• Do you know of examples/cases which fall into the author’s scope but are not mentioned?
• Does the paper convince you that the chosen method to analyse the empirical material is sufficient for answering the research questions?

Anything else

• Any question or aspect you think is important but not mentioned already.

See examples of good reviews and bad reviews at CHI2005 page.

After the session, remember to give one copy of your review to the author.