Week 4 Project Update

[rwal67]

Today (Wednesday, October 5th), in the wake of our prior story assignments, we convened in order to narrow down how we are planning to approach our markup of the short stories we will be covering. The central matter of this week has been how we are to identify and mark characters in the text, which we determined would best be done through searching for pronouns and mentions of characters, labelling them appropriately concerning their gender, and storing their moral alignment (relative to Sherlock Holmes as a protagonist) in a comprehensive table in the metadata of the work, alongside marking any action, motivation, sentiment, or quote that would accompany a pronoun or character mention that would give any indication of the motives and moral disposition of the observed characters. This was all in addition to general catching-up and brainstorming and our agreement to make a schema, made for a productive session that has further solidified our methods of research and annotation.

[LMDeJesus]

Hey everybody! You guys have a super cool project going with a lot of awesome text to work with. I really commend the work that you guys have done with SO much dialogue, I am excited to see how the dialogue will work into the thoughts/comparisons of gender. I love that you guys have also divided the work among yourselves in folders. I am also working with tagging descriptions of characters regarding gender. I am also struggling with what provides value when it comes to character description. You guys identified active description as being really important as opposed to something like "she has brown hair". I am wondering how you guys are choosing what is important? It might help me when I am making these sorts of decisions. Thank you advance!

[EmmaSchwarz]

Thanks for the update, Rory! The process you've detailed for identifying characters sounds great. Looking forward to seeing the results!

[amcheckeye]

Hey Sherlock team! I've been reading through your project materials, and I'm very interested in your methodology for attributing the "alignment" aspect. Did you plan to have that marked as a static attribute, since you mention 'storing [it] in a comprehensive table in the metadata'? I had an idea that maybe having alignment be more of a continuum might serve your research well if you wanted to show a correlation between amount of female agency and their alignment with Sherlock: having alignment change over time during a story could make for a cool line graph or even a network analysis. Now that we've looked at those, would you consider doing a network analysis model with your data?

Good luck, and I'll be looking forward to seeing the site design. I chose to leave my note here instead of the most recent project update since your design ideas still seem to be forming (as are those for my team).