Your exploration of the representation of themes in songs make me think of two former projects in our course, one about Turkish pop and one about Russian "healthy living" (that is, Neo-Nazi) rap. We looked at the Turkish one in class; it’s at http://turkish.obdurodon.org. The Russian one is at http://rap.obdurodon.org; it’s password protected because I got a takedown notice from the Russian counterpart to the FCC (!), which apparently didn’t care for the optics, but the userid is "minas" (name of one of the developers) and the password is "russianrap". I don’t mean to suggest that you should necessarily do what either of those teams did, but their goals seem similar enough to yours in structure that you may find that looking at their sites helps stimulate your thoughts about what you might want to do on yours.
This may be an artifact of my looking at your site on a 27" monitor, but the text looks very large, especially on the Criteria page, where it is so very much larger than the bulleted hierarchical list of criteria. That isn’t necessarily a problem if it’s the effect you were going for, but, for what it’s worth, because it deviates from what I expected on the basis of other sites, I experienced a cognitive interruption as I recalibrated my understanding of what font size meant.
You transliterate the song titles into the Latin alphabet in the menu. Since you are generally operating with original-language materials, you can use real Russian, in Cyrillic, if you wish. If you want to transliterate, though, you should use a standardized transliteration system—and it is especially important to use standardized transliteration if this will be a capstone project, where the expectations are that it will observe professional Slavistic research conventions. There are two such systems in wide use. The ALA-LC (also called “Library of Congress”) system is documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALA-LC_romanization_for_Russian; omit the diacritics, and use a Unicode Prime and Double Prime for the soft and hard signs, and not an apostrophe and double quote. The alternative transliteration convention is the “scientific system”, documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_transliteration_of_Cyrillic, which relies on diacritics (i.e., you’ll need to keep the diacritics if you choose this one). Social scientists and literary scholars favor ALA-LC; linguists favor “scientific” (and I use scientific in my own work). Either is consistent with professional research practice, so choose whichever you prefer.
Your SVG bar charts for the individual songs look good in general. You can clean them up a little, though, as follows:
The X axis is too long.
The axes do not meet squarely. You can fix this with the @stroke-linecap attribute.
The words “Analogy” and “Pun” in the legend are difficult to read against the white background. You can either choose stronger (less pale) colors or set a background color that contrasts clearly with all of the legend colors.
On the Analysis page, there is empty space under the stacked bar chart, and I don’t understand what the differently shaded bar components represent. Can you add a legend explaining them?
A few general suggestions:
Don’t forget to select and display a Creative Commons license.
Great presentation!
Your exploration of the representation of themes in songs make me think of two former projects in our course, one about Turkish pop and one about Russian "healthy living" (that is, Neo-Nazi) rap. We looked at the Turkish one in class; it’s at http://turkish.obdurodon.org. The Russian one is at http://rap.obdurodon.org; it’s password protected because I got a takedown notice from the Russian counterpart to the FCC (!), which apparently didn’t care for the optics, but the userid is "minas" (name of one of the developers) and the password is "russianrap". I don’t mean to suggest that you should necessarily do what either of those teams did, but their goals seem similar enough to yours in structure that you may find that looking at their sites helps stimulate your thoughts about what you might want to do on yours.
This may be an artifact of my looking at your site on a 27" monitor, but the text looks very large, especially on the Criteria page, where it is so very much larger than the bulleted hierarchical list of criteria. That isn’t necessarily a problem if it’s the effect you were going for, but, for what it’s worth, because it deviates from what I expected on the basis of other sites, I experienced a cognitive interruption as I recalibrated my understanding of what font size meant.
You transliterate the song titles into the Latin alphabet in the menu. Since you are generally operating with original-language materials, you can use real Russian, in Cyrillic, if you wish. If you want to transliterate, though, you should use a standardized transliteration system—and it is especially important to use standardized transliteration if this will be a capstone project, where the expectations are that it will observe professional Slavistic research conventions. There are two such systems in wide use. The ALA-LC (also called “Library of Congress”) system is documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALA-LC_romanization_for_Russian; omit the diacritics, and use a Unicode Prime and Double Prime for the soft and hard signs, and not an apostrophe and double quote. The alternative transliteration convention is the “scientific system”, documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_transliteration_of_Cyrillic, which relies on diacritics (i.e., you’ll need to keep the diacritics if you choose this one). Social scientists and literary scholars favor ALA-LC; linguists favor “scientific” (and I use scientific in my own work). Either is consistent with professional research practice, so choose whichever you prefer.
Your SVG bar charts for the individual songs look good in general. You can clean them up a little, though, as follows:
@stroke-linecapattribute.On the Analysis page, there is empty space under the stacked bar chart, and I don’t understand what the differently shaded bar components represent. Can you add a legend explaining them?
A few general suggestions:
Your site is looking Very Good and your presentation was terrific! I’ll look forward to seeing it take shape as you finalize it.