helvitiis
commented
6 years ago Hey guys!
I really enjoyed your project and I think it's a great mix of something both aesthetically pleasing and analytical. Your idea of confronting a prevalent issue in something popular was creative, and you presented it in a way that made sense. However, I think including a "key" to decode what some of the tooltips mean. A non-linguistic individual may have trouble deciphering what "2p, SF, plain" means on the song pages, and you could simply style a server side includes file to run over each of the songs.
Another small change might be on the Analysis page; the graph is a little small and the colors don't really match the site. Consider changing the female bars to pink and the male bars to red using the same shades as on the rest of your site. I think this would make more sense and be easier to see the results!
This project rocks, and it looks great for a semester-long time frame!
I think it was very thorough of you to research the gender of the singer and the song writer and not include any that had opposite genders. Great research! I understand why you combined the Neutral with Moderately Masculine but I have some questions about this. I have no experience with Japanese at all and I wonder, would there have been anything in the neutral category at all? Do they have any words that are gender neutral/that never get changed based upon who is speaking or being spoken to? Might it have been better to add another attribute to show the changed connotations or would this not have mattered at all? One thing I might add to the songs by decade is an indication of whether they are done by a male or female. People probably have no idea what gender names are that they haven’t heard before, sometimes this gets confusing even in English! This is a very cool way to study the changes of a language and the gender biases that still exist in it. Your organization is excellent on the site and your descriptions of your methods are very thorough. Great job!
Dorothea Lint