Guide B¶
From Records to Meaning¶
Guide B begins where Guide A ends.
If you used Guide A during your project, you now have something most students do not have at this point: a body of material that reflects how your project actually unfolded. Decisions recorded at the time they were made. Failures captured honestly. Reflections written before the project was tidied up for submission. That material is the foundation Guide B works with.
If you did not use Guide A, Guide B is still available to you — but it will be harder. You will need to work from memory, from formal artefacts, and from whatever informal notes you kept. The guidance here still applies; the raw material is simply thinner.
What Guide B Asks of You¶
Guide A asked you to pay attention and record.
Guide B asks you to judge.
The shift is significant. Recording is largely a habit — show up to the work, notice what matters, write it down. Interpreting requires something different: looking at everything you accumulated and deciding what it means, what is worth presenting, and how to connect it into something coherent for an audience that was not there.
This is harder than it sounds. Most students either reproduce too much — dumping their records into a showcase without filtering — or too little, summarising so vaguely that the showcase says nothing specific about them or their project. Guide B exists to help you find the middle path: selective, honest, evidenced, and genuinely yours.
What This Section Contains¶
Foundations establishes the conceptual basis for Guide B — the distinction between recording and interpreting, between raw records and professional evidence, and between a project that happened to you and a project you can explain. Read this before anything else in Guide B.
From Records to Narrative is the working guide. It covers the two inputs you draw from, the four extraction filters you apply to your material, what to leave out, and how to move from fragments to a coherent narrative. This is the document you will work with most actively.
Extraction Prompts provides specific questions to use alongside your records and artefacts. It is a reference document — not read top to bottom, but consulted deliberately as your extraction work develops.
From Fragments to Showcase addresses the structural and presentational questions: how to organise what you have extracted, what platforms and formats suit different disciplines and purposes, and what makes a showcase genuinely useful rather than decorative.
Integrity and Attribution covers the professional and ethical dimensions of presenting collaborative work individually — how to be specific about your contribution without misrepresenting the collective effort, and what makes a showcase credible under scrutiny.
How to Use Guide B¶
Work through the documents in order, at least for the first pass.
Foundations and From Records to Narrative are the core. They establish the thinking and the method. Extraction Prompts is a companion to the second document — use it alongside your actual records as you apply the filters. From Fragments to Showcase and Integrity and Attribution come into play once you have your material and are moving toward a presentable form.
Guide B and Itan
Guide B helps you develop a showcase for your final-year project specifically. If you want to build a wider professional portfolio — one that places your capstone work in the context of everything else you have made and learned — Itan is the natural next step. The two frameworks are designed to work together: Vestigia captures the project, Itan places it in the larger story of your professional development.
A Word on What This Produces¶
Guide B does not produce a single prescribed output.
What it produces depends on who you are, what your project was, and what you need the material for. For some students, the output is a portfolio page or case study. For others, it is a section of a CV and a set of talking points for interviews. For others still, it is a GitHub repository with a well-written README and project documentation. All of these are valid. Guide B gives you the thinking and the material; the form it takes is yours to decide.
What every output produced through Guide B should share, regardless of form, is this: it is specific, it is honest, and it can be defended in a conversation.
Begin with Guide B — Foundations.