Posts Tagged → writing

Winners of the Singular Source Contest

After careful consideration and discussion, we have chosen the winners of the Singular Source Short Story Contest.

We received a total of eight submissions to the short story contest, which made for a small slate of high quality candidates. There were no bad stories and every one was entertaining in some way. Every entry was read by all three judges independently. We subsequently met to discuss our assessments and to decide on a winner. (Actually, getting all of us together at the same time for a conference call was the most difficult part of the process.)

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Announcement: Singular Source Short Story Contest

I have exciting news to share.

I am running a short story contest, called Singular Source. I am looking for hard science fiction stories about future programming in the presence of large source code archives. The winner will be published as the last chapter of our edited volume Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse to be published by Springer Verlag in 2012.

We are funding the contest through an IndieGoGo campaign. Please consider contributing. Even a small amount will help.

It’s common to end academic books with a speculative chapter, and what would be more speculative than a science fiction short story? I invited Vernor Vinge to submit a story, because I think the future might be the programmer archeologists that appeared in his novels, Fire Upon the Deep and Deepness in the Sky. Rather than writing software from scratch, people are taking pieces from existing systems and combining them. In this style of programming, knowing the archives is as important as the ability to put the pieces together.

Unfortunately, Vinge declined. However, he did give his blessing for a short story contest. So, here we are.

While this isn’t my first literary competition, it has been a long time. I was once the Secretary of the Library Committee at Hart House, University of Toronto, which runs an annual short story contest.  Bear with me as I try to avoid making novice mistakes. Feedback is of course welcome. Chris  Szego of Bakka Phoenix Books has already set me straight on a number of aspects of the contest. Librarians, Annette and Kim, from the Merril Collection, have also provided helpful advice.

Reviewing Doctoral Symposium submissions

I just reviewed a whole pile of submissions to a doctoral symposium. These are 4-page summaries of the research the students propose to undertake for their dissertations. Students could be at any stage of their Ph.D.

I have some general advice for students who are writing similar papers.

* The literature review should be at most 25% of the paper, including the reference list at the end. The purpose of the literature review is to stake out the positions that you are in conversation with. It should not be the bulk of your paper. I’d much rather find out what you are thinking. If you can’t come up with at least two pages (or 50% of the document) about your own research, it might be a bit premature to get feedback from outside your lab.

* Don’t use bullet points to fill space or otherwise make up for your lack of content. Please write in proper paragraphs and well-formed prose. Your research statement should have a flow and an argument. It should be more than just a pile of points, which is what a series of bullets is.

Hopefully these observations will be helpful for other students who are writing for Doctoral Symposiums or PhD Forums elsewhere.