Week 11 Project Update

[CarolineMcDonough]

Week 11 Update

This week's meeting was focused on lining up the final pieces of the project such that we expect to be able to complete them for next week's showcase. To this end, we discussed our timeline (in terms of the tasks on the project checklist, our reading view progress, and our plans for SVG-based data visualization. We also discussed the possibility of employing schematron, but agreed we did not see a need to do so.

Timeline and Checklist ✅

To start the meeting, @cdornn helped us run through the poster project checklist, and we discussed our progress item-by-item as we went down the list. Some remain to be started— our SVG visualizations, referenced below, are only beginning construction this week— but most of the listed tasks are either complete or very near to completion.

Reading View 📚

Following up on our discussion from last week's meeting (#11), we hashed out the finer details of what needed to be completed in terms of our reading view. We had the basic scaffolding from XSLT Project 6, but needed to work to adapt the styles and tagging to better suit the website (and allow @Sean-Shmulevich to hook up the toggle-able check boxes on our website to the optional text styles applied based on female vs male actions and words).

@Sean-Shmulevich and I have since gotten together to more closely examine the methods and issues associated with this approach, and while we successfully managed to connect <action> tags (and their associated characters/genders) to the check boxes on the page, we encountered an issue that prevented us from doing the same for the character's quotes: the quotes have speakers, whose names are noted in an attribute, but do not have an associated gender attribute.

Because we agreed that changing any markup at this stage was unreasonable, we devised an alternative strategy to make sure the quotes all got <span> tags with gender-specific class attributes— an <xsl:if> statement which will output a "female" tag if the speaker's name matches a compiled list of female characters (located via distinct-value-ing the speaker attributes in the stories and visually sorting for female names), or a "male" tag if the name is not found on that list. That XSLT change is in development now, and will be ready for Wednesday, when we've been told by @cdornn that we'll learn how to batch-process documents with our XSLT. Those processed documents will become our reading view.

SVG Visualizations

With our newly-learned SVG skills, we considered what styles of visualizations would be best suited for the results of our project. We decided on three graphs:

1. A "butterfly bar graph" depicting words spoken by each character, divided along gender lines (put another way, two bar graphs with word counts for each character sharing a mutual character axis and word-count-scale)
2. Another butterfly graph depicting the same idea, but by count of total actions taken by each character
3. A butterfly or standard bar graph depicting cumulative data by gender (word count and action count for all female characters as compared to the same measures for male characters).

The visualization work will be split amongst the group based on who is able to find time to work on it, given the hectic schedule of this final week. Once all the graphs have been generated, a few paragraphs of analysis will be written explaining each one, which will appear below the graph on our website.

[esutton32]

I'm really impressed with everything you guys are doing! I admire how well formed your project updates are- separating them into very clearly defined items is a very smart move (and I love your use of emoji, hehe). I'm loving your ideas for SVG visualizations- after a lifetime of looking at nothing but bar graphs, I'm sure butterfly graphs will be really nice to see. I really really love your site! I'm very envious of your JavaScript abilities and all of your moving elements in the library view. In general, it's a very well formed and impressive website that I'm sure future projects will be looking to emulate. I like your use of github projects to assign project items, as that seems to have been very effective. Altogether, it really seems like your organization has been really efficient in terms of division of labor in order to get things done. I know these project comments aren't supposed to be a long list of things that you like about a project, but I'm having a hard time finding anything to nitpick or anything constructive to say that you all aren't already doing. I guess the only thing I am a little confused about is the arrow in the top screen when you are in a page that's not Home. I get its functionality, but I'm not really sure why it's necessary? If there's a specific reason, you might want to make it clear on the site why you want users to be able to use this function, if that makes sense. They could easily go to the menu and select the next thing. If the arrow is set in stone, I would suggest making an arrow with the ability to go back as well. Altogether, super cool project you guys are creating! 😸

[JacobAluise]

Hello Sherlock Team, First and foremost, it is a minor point, but I do like the way that this update is structured, and wish I could have taken inspiration for how to structure my own updates from your group sooner in the semester. Regardless of that, you've produced a fascinating and ambitious website and I can't wait to see what the finalized version looks like. I'm especially impressed by the design of the reading view, it's clever, functional and unobtrusive to the design of the site. I admire your decision to not do any more markup, now that the reading view is coming to fruition. While it can be difficult to tell when enough is enough, I would say that you all made a more than reasonable choice in terms of cutoff. Your ideas for SVG are interesting, and I hope you can get all three rendered by the final deadline, if not by the presentations on Friday. Overall, I commend you for the work you've put in and cannot wait to see your data and conclusions pages finished.