Semester Project Proposals

[ebeshero]

Post and discuss your ideas for semester projects here.

[nlottig94]

So @brookestewart and I were discussing what could be added to the Dickinson Project. Here are some suggestions of what could be added:

• More graphs about things that were changed in the publications of Dickinson's poems
  • More in depth graphs about the dashes
  • The change in the pronouns within Poem 11 where in her original poem Dickinson uses he's and me's and then, within the letter to Susan, uses I's and she's.
  • Also, how many original dashes were changed to other specific types of punctuation or stayed the same, and compare this throughout the different publications

Just some thoughts!

[jlm323]

I have been thinking about possibly working with The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. The Decameron is a collection of 100 short tales told by ten friends who escape to the countryside in Italy during the Black plague. Ten stories are told each day for ten days. Since there are so many stories, focusing on a few from each day might be best. We could look at the references contained in these tales, how each tale relates to one another, and look at the places mentioned to see how frequently they appear. I know one tale is about a Sultan's daughter who is placed on a ship to meet her new husband but ends up shipwrecked and is dragged all over the place before she finally gets to her destination and mapping this out in relation to places mentioned in the other tales would be interesting to look at.

[spadafour]

I'd like to work with @RJP43 on the Nell Nelson project. I would like to build on our work from the previous semester, further tagging verbs and possessive adjectives. What I would like to do is map possession and action. Using our set of 'archetypes,' we could map 2 things:

1. Nouns modified by possessive adjectives, showing what is owned by each archetype
2. Show the action that these archetypes are doing through verbs.

I believe @RJP43 would like to take the project in a geographic direction, attempting to map the places Nelson goes throughout her articles. I would still like to work on this if this is the direction the project takes, but these are my concerns:

1. We do not know how accurate Nelson's directions really are
2. We do not know if there is a reliable way to locate/refer to the streets and businesses of Chicago during Nelson's time
3. Nelson at times does not provide enough information to locate her position geographically.

[ebeshero]

@jlm323 What great idea for a coding project! I think this would be fascinating to use XML to mark the various levels of stories-within-stories...

[mmm202]

I have not really had any ideas for a project but I think @jlm323 idea is very interesting and would make a good project.

[RJP43]

@jlm323 your project idea sounds really interested. While as an undergraduate DH conference last semester there was some talk of a Brown University project on the Decameron. It would be wise to check out this project and see how your specific interests in mapping the specificity of single tales and focusing in on multi-tale references could make for a completely different project that focuses on a closer reading of a series of the tales. A benefit of a project of this size already existing is that you can likely pull the transcribed text (as long as you follow their license agreement). This project in particular does use XML based transcriptions that might be useful to grab from for your project. Another project, to look at, that goes off a specific aspect of the Decameron is found on our sister site here. This project takes a look at the Women in the Decameron. This could lead you to alter your focus possibly to investigate a specific group of people and you can mine the Brown project or the Obdurodon project for data (as long as you reference them) on the specific group or set of tales you want to work with. Hope that was helpful! What is wonderful about the Decameron is how big it is, and this allows opportunity to go into detail about a specific aspect. I like this project idea and want to participate in whatever ways possible, while running the Nelson project as well.

[RJP43]

@mjb232 Do you still have interest to work on a Blake inspired project?

@laurenmcguigan @mmm202 @mjb232 We are looking forward to each of your creative project proposals. Even if you show interest in an existing project or one of the other proposals posted here it is important that each of you goes through the process of conceptualizing a possible digital project. The deadline is fast approaching! Please post your project proposals here by tomorrow so we can get started forming teams after the Relax-NG exam.

[ebeshero]

@jlm323 and others interested in Boccaccio's Decameron: Those other sites that @RJP43 mentions didn't do much with Decameron's narrative structure, and I really think it might be interesting for you to start with your own markup and use that markup to investigate something interesting to you about the text: like, say numbers of narratives, how the narratives are layered. What else might be interesting to study about the stories? Here's a possible source text that's a translation by John Payne from 1888 (at a moment when English writers were taking a serious interest in Italian texts): http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23700

[laurenmcguigan]

Hello everyone! Sorry about the delay. However, I was reading over @jlm323 's idea, and it sounds very interesting. I come from an Italian background and I plan to study abroad in Italy over the summer, so this would definitely be something I would like to work on. I have never read the stories, but are they written by different people? Could we do a network analysis of the authors and characters in the stories and see how they are related? Also, this might be a dumb question, but are these real people or is it made up? could we do a comparison of what was happening in History during the time these letters were written and how they relate. We could also do some kind of family tree for each author if there is information known about their families. It might also be interesting to look at the type of language used in the letters. Maybe we could look at language used by males vs language used by females and see how it differs. There are definitely a lot of options with this project.

[laurenmcguigan]

The other idea that I had of my own was to do a Harry Potter themed project. I know that the idea has kind have been overused, but I thought it might be interesting to do something like the Lord of the Rings project we looked at in class. There are a lot of fans of those books, and I think it would be a fun project to work on, that others would enjoy as well. We could do family trees and a network analysis of the characters. We could also, somehow, look at the movies vs. the books and see how they differ. If doing all of the books would be too large of a project we could just look at the first book and the first movie and compare them. We could also look at keyword frequency like they do in the LOTR project. A lot of words in HP are made-up words like spells and creatures. We could look at the meaning of those words to see where the author got the names from and her use of certain myths like centaurs, unicorns, and werewolves. Also, the author of Harry Potter uses a lot of meaning to create names for spells and characters. For example, one of the characters in the story is named Remus Lupin. Lupin in a werewolf, and Lupin is a french word, derived from the latin word Lupinum, meaning wolf. We could also, maybe, analyze characters and the Houses they belong to, and see how their characteristics match up with the characteristics of each house. There are a lot of options for this project that may have not been done before that would be interesting to look at.

[mjb232]

@laurenmcguigan I really like the idea of making a network analysis of all the connections in HP, and I also really like the idea of looking into the meanings behind the different spells and names within HP. I do agree that there is a concern about the size of the material, but that's something the team can figure out (if we decide to use it). I personally would like to work on a HP project, but I'd understand if everyone else has had it beat into their heads.

On another note I also really like @jlm323 proposal! I'd love to work with text I haven't seen yet, and the amount of things we could actually do with these tales is enormous! I kind of really want to do a network analysis (I thought they were super cool) and I think this would be fun text to work with.

On another, other note. My own project proposal still involves Blake! So what I was thinking was that we could go along with the idea of comparing songs of innocence and experience side by side, but a new twist would be to also analyze the pictures published along side each poem. We could compare imagery within each poem to an actual image on the page, or perhaps having the specific image pop up when the text is clicked on. We could also keep track of repeating images in both the illustrations and the actual poems. There are also different variations on the illustrations published so we could compare these as well. My only concern is whether or not we actually have the tools to manipulate and markup an actual image.

[jlm323]

@laurenmcguigan The Decameron is a fictional work, written entirely by Boccaccio! It's basically a huge frame tale, where the ten main characters tell 100 stories of their own. They're stories inside of a story.

The HP idea sounds really neat! I absolutely love HP and I really like the idea of modeling it after the LOTR project with word frequency. I think the issue we run into here, however, is copyright right one, although I'm not sure. We might have trouble getting the full text, in other words.

I also like @mjb232 proposal because I do remember there were so many different illustrations that went along with Songs of Innocence and Experience but as you said, it might be a little difficult to markup an image.

[RJP43]

@jlm323 you are right in what you have suggested above to @laurenmcguigan ; the Harry Potter text is under proprietorship and therefore copyright protected; however, if this proposal becomes what some of us work on there are ways of still doing this we will just have to work around reprinting any of the text. One way I can think of right off the bat is considering fan fiction of Harry Potter. This might be a completely different idea all together, but if enough of us have interest in the topic it might be worth seeing what we can make out of it.

@jlm323 I think I already expressed how much I am really interested in the Decameron proposal, but if I haven't I will again now. This is a great idea! Working with a framed narrative really will give a challenge, but ultimately feelings of great success in the determination of a tagging system that works with this complicated hierarchy. I look forward to hearing more about this project!

@mjb232 One of my favorite parts of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience was the publication of the illuminated books using the copper plates. I think it would be really interesting to bring out this feature of the Blake work and it is not something that the Obdurodon site we had mentioned previously goes into great detail doing. I am a huge Blake fan so I would also love to see this project launch and would definitely want to help wherever possible. As for being able to markup images there is something called image mapping and some of this work was done by @brookestewart and @nlottig94 on the Dickinson project in the Fall. I think that if the Dickinson project continues work, while this Blake project is also launching there could be some solid back and forth between the two projects regarding manipulating/formatting and "marking-up" images.

As for the Nelson project, @spadafour and I have settled that this will be an ongoing project for the both os us no matter what other projects (if any) that we also get involved with. Ideally I would like to continue with the grammatical markup that @spadafour mentions above and expand on it a bit by really focusing on the possessive pronouns and verbs. However, I would also like to begin the versioning of the texts as well. I think we could use the grammatical markup to do this, by making a comparison of the certain parts of speech (like verbs - so therefore the actions expressed) between the original articles and what was edited out in the Barkley publication. I know it may seem like the Nelson project is overly complicated, but as you will all find out soon enough every good digital project involves a similar amount of attention to detail and continuous growth. If you are interested in learning more about the Nelson project our site is always a great start, and I would also encourage you to check out our GitHub wikis.

@mmm202 I see that you mention you are interested in @jlm323 project proposal, but as I mentioned in last night's post the process of conceptualizing your own project proposal (no matter how basic or incomplete) excites the kind of creative idea formulation that will make you an intrinsically valued member of whatever project you end up working on. Plus, frequently what happens when every student provides a proposal is that the ideas had by one student on a specific method to approaching a text/subject end up being useful in the development of the way another project goes about approaching a different text/project.

I hope all of that makes sense. I have been awake entirely to long so some of that may have been a jumbled mess. I look forward to seeing you all in class today and seeing where each of your ideas lead in the forming of our project teams.

[nlottig94]

@jlm323 @mjb232 @mmm202 @laurenmcguigan Has anyone decided on what projects they would like to work on?? We need some discussion going on so we can create project teams tomorrow! Remember, our options are:

• To continue on The Restoration of Nell Nelson with @RJP43 and @spadafour
• To continue on Emily Dickinson: Fascicle 16 with @brookestewart and myself
• Create a new project on The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
• Create a new project on William Blake

Be prepared for class tomorrow!!

[laurenmcguigan]

Of all the options, I think I would still want to work on the Decameron project. I don't know very much about the stories, so I am not sure what all we could do, but possibly a network analysis. Or a comparison of the events going on in the books vs. what was actually going on in that time in history? Or compare the language used by female characters vs male characters. These are just some suggestions, I am sure there is a lot more we could do with it. The only concern I have with this project is that I have never read it before. How long are each of the stories and would we be analyzing all of them or just a few? Also, I know that the former students want to work on their past projects , but I think it would be a good idea to have at least one of them on the Decameron project team. I know Dr. B had mentioned the former students would work on their own projects and then also contribute to the new projects, I think that would be helpful, if that is what they want to do.

[jlm323]

@laurenmcguigan I haven't read all of the stories in the Decameron either but I do know that they're relatively short stories and they're mostly allegorical. I think doing a network analysis on the places mentioned in the stories could be interesting because we could see how often certain places appear. Also although the characters are fictional, some of them are based on real people so we could definitely investigate that along with exploring what was going on in the stories and what was actually happening during that period in history.

I do want to work with the Decameron but I have a last minute proposal that I think future students could do which is working with A Song of Ice and Fire, a.k.a. Game of Thrones. Exploring the connections between the fictional religions in the series would be interesting (there are similar prophecies across the religions in the books and similar religious figures/deities), as well as comparing the events in the series with real occurrences. For example, some of Game of Thrones is based loosely off of the War of the Roses in England.

[nlottig94]

Project Assignments:

• Boccaccio
  • @jlm323 @mmm202 @mjb232 @laurenmcguigan
• Nelson
  • @RJP43 @spadafour
• Dickinson
  • @brookestewart @nlottig94

All of the returning students will be helping with the new project!!