Research Questions

[ZSchleger]

1. What are the differences in language, themes, and motifs between the original trilogy, prequel trilogy, and sequel trilogy of Star Wars scripts?
2. What linguistic patterns and rhetorical devices are present in the Star Wars scripts?
3. How have the characters in the Star Wars universe developed and evolved through the scripts?
4. What role do cultural and societal influences play in the language and themes present in the Star Wars scripts?
5. How do the Star Wars scripts utilize symbolism and metaphor to convey meaning and themes?
6. What is the impact of dialogue and monologue on character development in the Star Wars scripts?

[ebeshero]

These are terrific research questions. Let's see how we can address them:

• [ ] We can get some help from Python and spaCy to do some NER (named entity recognition) to help pull out a cast of all the character names in each file.

  • [ ] We could then write some code to find and replace each of the names spaCy finds into the files in their XML form (once those are ready). We can use that info in a network analysis that can show the changes to the character lists over the different scripts.
  • [ ] Alternatively, we could do this in a more bulky way with Python, I think: Get it to count the number of times particular characters are mentioned each whole file.

• [ ] About the words and phrase patterns: Have you tried scoping your files with Antconc's ngram analysis? (Definitely try that and see what you can see--what are some ngrams of interest? What changes do you see across the scripts? Someone on the team should be assigned this...

• [ ] What examples of symbolism do you notice as you review your files? Try scoping your files with Python and spaCy working with parts of speech and named entities.

  • We worked with spaCy's POS (parts of speech) analyzer back in January / February.
  • Take a look at its Named Entity recognition: https://github.com/newtfire/textAnalysis-Hub/blob/main/Class-Examples/Python/nlp-spaCy/nlp-sentences.py