QUARTER-LONG PROJECT

Week 3: Writing a Preliminary Project Proposal

This week, you must organize your thinking about the quarter-long project by developing your topic/scope from last week into a short proposal. Timely submission of your proposal is worth 4 of the 30 total points available for the quarter-long project.

Your proposal should state:

• Some background on the topic, particularly why it is interesting.
• Research question(s). What do you hope to find out?
• Data required to answer the question(s).
• Where you will obtain the data required. This may be public Web sites or perhaps data that you have access to through work or personal contacts.
• What you will do with the data, in general terms. What sort of maps, statistical analysis, spatial analysis, do you intend to carry out?

I realise at this point that you may feel that your knowledge is too limited for the last point in particular. If you don't know the technical names for the types of analysis you would like to do, then at least try to describe the types of things you would like to be able to say after finishing the analysis. This will give me and other students a firmer basis for making constructive suggestions about the options available to you.

The proposal does not have to be detailed at this stage—around 200-400 words should suffice. However, it should cover all the above points, so that I and others evaluating the proposal can make constructive suggestions about additions, changes, other sources of data, and so on.

Post your preliminary project proposal to the 'Project Initial Proposal disucssion board' provided as a plain text message (to go there, click 'Next' above).

Questions?

If you have any questions now or at any point during this project, please feel free to post them to the Quarter-long Project Discussion Forum. (That Discussion Forum can be accessed at any time by clicking on the In Touch tab, above, and then scrolling down to the Discussion Forums section.)

That's it for the quarter-long project this week!