Semester Project Proposals

[ebeshero]

Post a tentative, exploratory project proposal here: What ideas do you have for an interesting XML-based semester project to work on in a small team?

• What kind of text(s) would you mark? (Link out to resources as you find them, or comment on where we can find a "base text" to start working with.)
• What research questions do you want to investigate?
• What approach would you want to take with the markup?

Each of you should post a project proposal here, and respond to each other, and we'll form teams next week once we've all had a chance to read and respond and modify/develop the ideas together!

"Repurposing" or continued development of existing projects is welcome, as well as proposing new projects. Repurposing work should move an existing project in a new direction. You can review past projects in the two coding courses here on newtFire: http://newtfire.org/dh/studentProjects.html

initial proposal posts due by F 9-15 Follow-up conversation continues over the weekend @Jamielynn92 @tal80 @quantum-satire @kes213 @flowerbee1234 @pab124 @ajnewton1 @jonhoranic @gabikeane @zme1 @amk231 @ghbondar

[jonhoranic]

@ajnewton1 @bsf15 @gretchenuhrinek @Samantha-Mcguigan

Hello everyone!

Knowing that this is the proposal page I wanted to lend a hand to show you what my proposal last semester looked like to hopefully give you guys a loose model to go off of. Of course it does not have to follow my points exactly (mainly due to my long winded-ness that I am sure you are slowly being introduced to) just give it a read over and think about what your proposal could contain!

Here is the main repository and the proposal itself! It has gone through various edits, but the content is practically unchanged, it was just polished a bit to look a bit more professional! I am still tinkering with the site the best I can (that darn CSS styling being a regular thorn in my side!), let me know what you guys think! Compare it to our project's page currently, any comments/criticism is welcome!

Who knows, if any of you want to pick this up again I'll be glad to open the project up to even more coders! Just remember to post whatever proposals you can come up with, and I might end up helping you!

[gretchenuhrinek]

So, as we all know, our society has been pretty impassioned about politics lately. A common topic has been truth in the media. It's really hard to root out the most credible sources, because a lot of journalism lately has been more about sensationalism and bias than fact. I think it would be a really interesting project to pick a few popular news sources and mark up the articles each posts about the same events. The sources I had in mind were Fox News, CNN, NPR, and BBC (which are typically considered conservative, neutral, liberal, and international, respectively).

Possible things that could be marked up in the articles may be:

• adjective and adverb use outside of direct quotations, and whether or not these words typically register a positive or negative emotion
• sources and source credibility
• use of statistics in the articles
• age, gender, sex, and race of speakers, subjects, and journalists

Ideally, this markup would help reveal the integrity of news organizations and could perhaps be used as a sort of "truth finder" or something. I think it would be a super cool project, what do you guys think?

[dotfig]

I like the way you're thinking @gretchenuhrinek. That does sound neat to look into and see all the difference there is.

Something that interests me is mapping out where Jesus and the 12 disciples have traveled throughout the New Testament. To make things simpler maybe just look at the 4 gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and map out from there. One of the exercises I did for Relax-NG dealt with quotes and that is also something that we could do. Try to determine who said what and who they were talking to or something along those lines. Im not really sure, just trying to spitball some ideas out there.

[ahunker]

My project idea involves looking at song lyrics and history. I'm currently taking an American Revolution history course and I am a Hamilton (the musical) fan. Hearing the facts of the war in comparison to what was told on stage I'm finding to be really interesting. I'm recognizing names, dates, places, and even direct quotes from historical documents that were written into the musical. It would be interested in seeing where the two line up and agree and where Lin-Manuel Miranda, author of the book and lyricist, decided to stray from history. It might also be interesting to look at the timeline of Hamilton in comparison to American history. We could even look at some of the earlier versions of the songs to see how they've changed into what's being shown on the stage or even songs that were cut entirely. Let me know if anyone's interested or if you have any suggestions for a different way to look at this. @ajnewton1 Your idea sounds very interesting. It would allow you to create some great visualizations. If you're looking at different speakers, maybe you could plot where each specific disciple and Jesus journeyed to. I know they traveled together a lot, but I also know there were times when they were separated. It may be interesting to see who Jesus talks to or interacts with the most. For example, was it his disciples or Pharisees or the masses? I feel like you could look at a variety of things and come up with some great images for this idea.

[bsf15]

@ahunker, I was actually trying to come up with a decent project proposal revolving around Hamilton as I've been a tad bit obsessed with it myself. I love the idea of comparing the musical to actual historic events, perhaps even taking reference to the book by Ron Chernow that Lin Manuel Miranda based a majority of the musical off of. Along with timelines, I was originally thinking of an idea revolving a musical, Hamilton actually being my initial interest, and somehow organizing characters, such as how often certain characters talk/sing/rap together or how often they are referenced by a character. I was also very interested in looking into all the repeated lines/phrases within the musical and taking note of which unique phrases(such as "I am not throwing away my shot" for those familiar with the musical) show up the most often and are said by which character. For the most recent relax-ng assignment I was trying to play around with more of the idea of mapping out all the unique references each character receives, from direct references to their name, nicknames, or even more abstract ideas referring to that character. I could imagine doing a small network of sorts that could represent the characters and popular reoccurring lines throughout the show or character references. I really like the idea of creating a timeline though, and even making a big focus being showing a timeline of the historical representation of the show vs actual history.

[ahunker]

@bsf15 I like your idea of finding repetition within the lyrics. A lot of the characters have lines they repeat like, "I am not throwing away my shot". It would be interesting to see if it's just one character who says a specific line or multiple who say it in different ways. I feel like you could find similar lines as well. A lot of people talk about having enough or not enough time in life and there are a lot of references to writing. I wonder if we could isolate themes by looking at repeated phrases. As I mentioned above, there are lines in the show that are taken directly from historical documents, it would be interesting to see if any of the repeated lines are based on or direct quotes from those documents.

[Samantha-Mcguigan]

I have a literature minor and am interested in working in the publishing industry after I graduate, so I wanted to look at some form of writing. I am especially interested in feminist writing. I also found the previous project on Emily Dickinson fascinating and I believe Becca said a number of us had been coding poems so I though we could do something similar with Sylvia Plath and look at her use of gender in her poems. We could code the words that have to do with gender and try to uncover how she uses them and whether her use of either gender is positive or negative or something else by looking at words that surround gendered terms such as mother. father, he, she, etc. I actually already coded one of her poems for an earlier assignment and found it really interesting so I would like to read more of her works. I found three websites that have her poems that we could use: http://www.internal.org/Sylvia_Plath http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/sylvia-plath#about

[ebeshero]

@ahunker @bsf15 Audrey and Bri: For Hamilton (and indeed for any text-based project) we'd best find a digital text. I went hunting for the script, and I found a libretto: the song lyrics appear to be available here: http://atlanticrecords.com/HamiltonMusic/ Looks like there's lots of annotation going on of this on genius.com, and it might be interesting to see what's going on there...even to study the kinds of attention being directed at the musical.

[Samantha-Mcguigan]

I also really like @gretchenuhrinek 's idea about coding news articles. It would be interesting to see what supposedly "unbiased" news sources really talk about and how they compare to each other. I know you mentioned looking for what is outside of quotes but we could also take whole quotes themselves and tag what position the person has on the issue they are discussing or if they have a position at all. This could help us see if they are talking to people on both sides of an issue or just one that helps push their own agenda.

[ebeshero]

@Samantha-Mcguigan I was thinking about your proposal on Plath. If we were to start a project like the Emily Dickinson site (which is really intricate work), to do it properly, you want a) a set of digital texts (like the ones you found), and b) to work closely with good print editions of her poems. I think the one we'd want is titled Ariel. It's in the Pitt libraries, but to give you an idea, here's an Amazon overview.

The Dickinson team had the advantage of repurposing an earlier site made in the 1990s by a graduate student at UVa, which started with a series of manuscript and book images that the grad student made from photos and put up on a website, to pair with her edition. The site's code became dated, but our team worked to repair it and add a lot to it! You can read about how we repurposed that old project here, and see what the original site looked like, too: http://dickinson16.newtfire.org/about.html

Two members of that Dickinson team are still working on that project on their own, adding more and more poems to it! They have a method worked out, to go check various published versions of Dickinson's poems and code all the differences: their site tracks all the different variations in which their selections of Dickinson's poems appear.

[RJP43]

Spring 2017 Project Teams

Hamilton = @ahunker (team leader) @bsf15 URL will be hamilton.newtfire.org (Need to set up GitHub repo) News Project = @gretchenuhrinek (team leader) @jonhoranic @ajnewton1 @Samantha-Mcguigan URL will be newsAnalysis.newtfire.org (Need to set up GitHub repo)

[RJP43]