Weekly Project Update (9-28-22)

[esutton32]

Weekly Project Update 9-28 :comet:

Accomplished: A very productive meeting was held on 9-27, although only Emma, Mikey, and Ella were in attendance. Maddie was sorely missed, of course. During this meeting, we:

1. Discussed source materials; from lyrics on Genius to novel on Project Gutenberg to sheet music that we may or may not be able to scan from the library
2. Had a very invigorating discussion about how the final website would look if everything pans out the way we want to; more info can be found in the Meeting Notes but general ideas include direct popups of the novel in lyrics that use it as a source among others
3. Learned that Sonic Visualizer is a bust, but that we may have a lead with the MEI

Assigned:

1. Mikey looking into MEI and sheet music scanning endeavors
2. Maddie creating a reference sheet for characters (which Ella would be so down to help with if help is needed)
3. Emma looking into possible hidden XML database for already accomplished War and Peace XML
4. Ella beginning basic XML markup of lyrics and placing them in newly made Github folder

To-Do:

1. Concretely decide how deep we will go in our markup and establish tags that we can begin using beyond the general verse, stanzas, etc
2. Decide whether or not we are using TEIheader and, if not, deciding how we will encode metadata

For more info/see anything I might have missed, please see the meeting notes from this week.

[amcheckeye]

Hi Team!

I enjoyed reading about your project goals so far. Although I haven't read War and Peace, I can instinctively say that the idea in your meeting notes about comparing the anglicized character names vs. the way they might appear in the book and musical is super important. Russian Lit tends to refer to characters by their full names, and then sometimes just by the first name and patronymic, then again maybe as diminutives or nicknames by characters who know them well. I'm assuming that the anglicized versions are from the musical? If you're going to directly compare sections of the book to the parts of the musical they correlate to, having all of the names associated will be vital. I think your character elements across both texts should be tagged in a standard way with maybe attributes that allow the longer or shorter versions to be always connected. It might be an interesting addition to your finished site to have a musical playbill type rendition where it lists the cast as Natasha played by Natasha Ilyinichna Rostova aka "Natalya" (not sure if she goes by her diminutive or not).

I think this would be helpful to folks not accustomed to Russian naming conventions. :-) good luck!

[reneedubaich]

Hi everyone! This project looks so interesting and I can't wait to see how the final project turns out. I love Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, its one of my favorite musicals. I have never looked into War and Peace, so I am very intrigued on how the musical takes inspiration from the novel. I have always listened to the soundtrack because the music is amazing, but the story has always confused me as the lyrics include references to the novel. I can't wait to learn more about the connections between the musical and the novel. I love your ideas of how you plan to implement these two sources into your webpage. I think a feature where a lyric can reference to a quote in the novel is very smart and allows the viewer to follow along the musical and gain all significant background information connecting its narrative to War and Peace. Also, I love that you are including all character descriptions, as there are soooo many characters that sometimes the relationships can get confusing.

I'm looking forward to how this project progresses :)

(this is monthly project response for september)

[EmmaSchwarz]

Thanks for the update, Ella! We appreciate how you have divided your update into "Accomplished," "Assigned," and "To-Do": it makes your team's progress very clear. Looking forward to seeing the results of your musical/lyrical/textual markup!