Empirical Modelling as a Experimental piece of Application for Note taken

You have an interesting idea here I think. The main issue is to understand better why you have chosen this application as a way of illustrating Empirical Modelling principles. This is an issue which your abstract doesn't explicitly address.

Bear in mind that the quality of your work as an illustration of EM will not be judged on the quality of the final application. The most interesting aspect of EM is the activity that goes into laying the groundwork for the application. You may well be able to make a basic prototype for the kind of application you have in mind, but the most important thing is to approach its construction in the right way. If you do construct it appropriately it will have great flexibility as far as adapting the application and shaping the interface etc is concerned. By way of illustration, think for example of how the program that plays noughts-and-crosses and the procedure that does heapsorting are relatively small components of the modelling activity that went into making the relevant construals.

I know that your aim is to make a tool that can be used in real time to organise material as it is being delivered. This poses many technical challenges that are only tangentially related to EM concerns. I think you have chosen this application because you see promising potential for using dependency structures to link together resources of various different kinds in a flexible way. I imagine that you have in mind both ways of presenting the resources and ways of organising them. It would of course be practically useful if this organisation and presentation could be done on-the-fly, in real-time, in the situation in which the resources are being generated, but I think this grand objective is secondary. Your first concern is to consider how - given that you have gathered a bunch of resources - you would assemble them using EM principles based on identifying observables and dependencies. So I'd begin by imagining that you have a collection of text files, images, audio resources etc and figure out what observables you are going to use to model them, and how you then propose to use definitive scripts to interrelate them. If you can make a good construal of the relationship between your various resources, it will naturally be possible to rearrange and reconfigure and manage access to these resources simply by making redefinitions of appropriate kinds. Achieving this goal would be quite enough to get an excellent mark for your project. (The construal I made for the Onward! essay presented earlier in the module - see Seeion 6.1 - might be a helpful model to look at here, though it is JS-EDEN rather than EDEN based.)

Of course, it would be good to try to interface to existing applications, like DropBox, and to make a user-friendly interface that ultimately might operate in real-time in a lecture situation, but this is not something to focus on initially. The more relevant applications are things like the definitive relational DB notation EDDI and the role that scripts based on this can play in reconfiguring links between resources. Your remark about 'allowing space for improvement by others' is well-conceived, so long as you provide the foundation that makes this improvement easy.

A final comment: the most important skill you need to work on overall is your written communication. This will not only be essential for your WEB-EM submission, but valuable in all your studies. At the moment, your writing comes across as 'stream-of-thought' - as if you never re-read it, or considered whether the structure and content are well-conceived. There is a lot of evidence of good thinking behind your writing, but it isn't well communicated. Trying to communicate more effectively will assist your thought processes. For example, review your submission sentence-by-sentence, reading it with full critical attention. If you can recognise where sentences aren't properly formed that is good, as that is the essential first step to improving them. As a starting point, consider the following issues concerning the title of your submission: "Empirical Modelling as a Experimental piece of Application for Note taken":

• "Empirical Modelling as a ... piece of Application" means what? We can talk about "applications of EM", but not so easily of "EM as an application of something". And what does a "piece of Application" mean?
• 'a Experimental' should be 'an Experimental'
• By "Note taken" you surely mean "Note taking"

Perhaps what you mean is something like 'Using EM as a component in the implementation of an application for note taking'. I'm not sure where the 'experimental' aspect fits in here, but perhaps it relates to the fact that you are concerned with exploring the application in an open-ended manner prior to full implementation, which might fit in well with a title such as "Making an EM construal of an Application for Note Taking". Only you can say whether this is what you have in mind, but you need to carry out a similar exercise with other sentences in your submission.