Fully-Automated Luxury Dancing: Summary Assignment

You will work on this assignment individually and submit your own work as a single file to Moodle. Submit your abstract only (see below); there’s no need to submit the original article as well.

The attached/linked paper, ‘Fully-Automated Luxury Dancing’, appeared a year or so ago. It was deliberately published without an abstract.

Your task is to supply a 250-300 word abstract summarising the paper, including the case it attempts to make and how it achieves this. Your abstract should describe the paper’s purpose and structure, touch upon its detail and analysis, and summarise its conclusions.

Although the paper has a provocative style and its analysis and conclusions could be considered controversial, for this assignment, you should restrict yourself to merely summarising the paper as it’s written (as if the author themselves had written the abstract), rather than attempting any critical analysis. Instead, you’ll progress to these essential critical analysis skills on a different piece of research in Assignment 2.

All required work must be submitted, in full and as directed and described, by the due time and date, to receive timely feedback from the module leader. Submissions after the given deadline will score a maximum of 40% (pass). Submissions more than seven days after the deadline will not be marked and will score 0%.

The purpose and form of a paper’s ‘abstract’ will be covered very early in the module but, before you start, if you’re still less than confident, look at several examples online to familiarise yourself. You are advised to read the ‘Fully-Automated Luxury Dancing’ paper at least twice (skim and detail) before you attempt to write the abstract. You will probably want to refer to parts of the paper for further detail at least a third time as you draft the abstract. Remember, for this first assignment, you’re summarising the paper ‘as is’ rather than critically analysing it.

You will be given a mark out of 100 as per the marking criteria on the following sheet.

Individual feedback will be given through Moodle within three weeks of the submission date.

The module leaders can be contacted through email. However, although they may, if appropriate, provide general guidance or clarify issues of interpretation or understanding, they are not usually able to give specific or focused advice on questions relating to material within the assignment.

All work is fully-marked by the module leader or a team associate, then second marked by another member of staff. Work may then be further marked as part of our internal moderation processes and/or considered by the external examiner.