Academic Integrity

Your behavior as a responsible member of the new-media arts community is very important — as demonstrated, for example, by properly citing your sources and borrowed code, and crediting those who have helped you. These expectations and obligations are addressed here, in our course Academic Integrity Policy.

SUMMARY OF CMU ACADEMIC INTEGRITY POLICIES

Carnegie Mellon University prohibits academic dishonesty. This includes plagiarism, and may consist of: submitting the work of someone else as one’s own; failing to cite assistance you received; or the failure to properly cite materials or ideas from other sources. Nearly all of these problems can be circumvented if you’re clear and generous in giving credit where credit is due. Please read the University Policy on Cheating and Plagiarism to understand the penalties associated with academic dishonesty at Carnegie Mellon University. I reserve the right to determine an appropriate penalty based on the violation of academic dishonesty that occurs. The penalty for plagiarizing may range from failure on the specific plagiarized assignment to failure in the class. If you have any questions about this policy as it relates to work you are doing in the course, please feel free to contact the professor.

POLICIES FOR OPEN-ENDED CREATIVE PROJECTS

For your open-ended, public-facing projects, which will be presented and hosted in this WordPress site, there are no “correct answers”. Your curiosity, creativity, ingenuity and originality are prized.

You may borrow code or ideas from other sources, within the limits of “reasonable person” principles described below, provided you attribute your sources. Your work will appear, publicly, on the open Internet. Your projects will likely be discussed and critiqued in front of (and with the assistance of) your peers.

As studio art students, you are expected or invited to make extensive use of open-source libraries, tutorials, and freely-distributed code. When working in this way, much like a knitting circle, our classroom is structured around peer instruction, in which students are expected to help each other learn.

USE OF FREE AND OPEN-SOURCE CODE IN PROJECTS

Credit is perhaps the most important form of currency in the economies of commons-based peer production and open-source media arts. You are expected to cite the source of any code you use. Please note the following expectations and guidelines:

Use Libraries. In your Projects, the use of general, reusable libraries is strongly encouraged. The people who developed and contributed these components to the community worked hard, often for no pay; acknowledge them by citing their name and linking to their repository.

Be Careful. It sometimes happens that an artist places the entire source code for their sketch or artwork online, as a resource from which others can learn. The assignments professors give in new-media arts courses are often similar; you may discover the work of a student in some other class or school, who has posted code for a project which responds to a similar assignment. You should probably avoid this code. At the very least, you should be very, very careful about approaching such code for possible re-use. If it is necessary to do so, it is best to extract components that solve a specific technical problem, rather than those parts which operate to create a unique experience. Your challenge, if and/or when you work with others’ code, is to make it your own. It should be clear that forking an artwork from someone’s page on GitHub, Glitch, OpenProcessing, etc., and simply changing the colors would be disgracefully lazy. Doing so without proper citation would be plagiarism.

POLICIES REGARDING INFORMAL COLLABORATION

Our course places a very high value on civic responsibility that includes, but is not limited to, helping others learn. In this course, we strongly encourage you to give help (or ask others for help) in using various toolkits, algorithms, libraries, or other facilities. Please note the following expectations:

In this class, it’s OK to give and receive help. In fact, it’s better than OK! But students who receive help from someone else are obliged to acknowledge that person in their project report, clarifying the nature of the help that was received.
We are all teachers. Students with advanced skills are expected to help others, yet refrain from doing another’s work for them. You can usually tell when you’re about to cross the line: Ask yourself whether you are teaching someone to fish, or merely giving them the fish.
When in doubt: give credit to the people who have helped you.

POLICIES REGARDING FORMAL COLLABORATION

The assignments in this course are primarily intended to be executed by individuals. That said, I am in favor of students collaborating if such collaborations arise organically and can be conducted safely. Please note the following expectations:

Use proper social distancing. In light of the ongoing the COVID-19 pandemic, please respect University and other health guidelines regarding personal distance. Do not share computer keyboards, sit at least 6 feet apart, etcetera.
Notify the Professor. It’s helpful for me to know who is working with whom. Students who wish to collaborate should jointly inform the professor as early as possible.
Only pairs. Unless permission is explicitly granted by the Professor, collaborations in this course are restricted to pairs of students.
Describe who did what. Written reports for collaborative projects should describe how your effort was distributed.
Only known collaborators. Your project collaborator, if you have one, must be in this class. You may not collaborate with people from outside the course (e.g. your housemate).
Avoid co-dependency. You may not collaborate with the same person (i.e. submit an assignment jointly) on more than two projects.