Project Feedback!

[RJP43]

Please write feedback for the Lope team here.

[PPH3]

I really enjoyed the linguistic qualities of this project. Through your dissection of these plays, I am curious to investigate some of these works and search for some ancient and biblical references. The one about Judith is especially interesting. The essence of this research, however, is the distinction between emotion and body. This is vigorous literary scholarship and I the SVG charts illustrate the distinctions nicely. I'm wondering if the audiences of these plays were sensitive to these themes or if this is something illuminated through modern analysis? Great work, great cataloging, and keen insight into a writer who demands appreciation on a larger scale.

[jonhoranic]

I love the design and layout of the entire project! It is simple and clean, which really does help me get a brief overview of the parts of the collection displayed. As a reader who has little to no understanding of Spanish, I would love to see this project grow to include either translations of text or explanations to better understand how the Spanish language is used in relatable English terms. I would have never been exposed to these works if it was not for this project, and it is understandable that making this content accessible is that first step needed to give Lope more exposure to gain wider reader interest. Hope to see what else can be done with the collection!

[RJP43]

@setriplette @ahunker @msb81 Wow, this project is really turning out well. I think that the overall site look is very appealing. @ahunker I really like your way of emphasizing floating text and the fixed highlight toggle box. In fact, why not have the toggle box on plays to be the same way? I think it makes sense to have it scroll down the page as you read since users might want to un-toggle these options and currently on the plays pages you have to go back to the top to do so. Also since these are longer texts you might want to add a "back to top" link in the toggle box that links to an @id on the text's title at the top so users can easily jump back up to the beginning of the page.

@msb81 really fantastic prosopography work! @setriplette maybe consider organizing the output by category (and alphabetical) and on-click in your toggle box it jumps down to the specific list (type of person/place).

I think it is important that somewhere you give the site user a lot of the information you gave us in your presentation. I think it is especially important to talk about your methodology of grabbing certain words. Your process of literary analysis and comparison of close reading versus distant reading (like how you said distant reading might be a future aspect of the project but until corpus of words can be identified you guys needed to do close reading to grab specific words) is really interesting and a part of the bigger story of your methodology that the site users should know.

I really love the map idea. I think it emphasizes the concept of how a book can take us all around the world and will be awesome to see how that comes together!

My only other suggestions are ones I have given to @ahunker and @setriplette individually on your SVGs:

• For the Boba SVG -- body and emotion what? WORDS! Also, give us a paragraph explaining each bar on the graph (you gave us a lot of great information in your talk but the graph doesn't make any of that inherently obvious to a person looking at just the visualizations; it is your expertise from close reading that will help those distant readers get a clearer sense of the importance of emotion and body in Lope's work.)
• For the Castille SVG -- what does the emotion part of speech show us about Lope's writing and/or about the time period? Also, I think the percentages on each bar are pretty much necessary since it is hard to tell how much any of the parts of speech, besides noun, show up.

[setriplette]

@RJP43 Good ideas, but I'm definitely not grouping the personography that way. It's a short list anyway, and that way a person scrolling for alphabetical order can look for their person once and not four times. The risk is that someone who is scrolling and not searching with a find command will scroll to where they think the entry should be and not realize it's in a division farther down the page. What if they don't know what category people belong to? I'm also planning a massive persons list collating the plays once we have more people, and for bigger lists I'll have to figure out a way to display all the plays a person is mentioned in. Problems for later.

[setriplette]

Also having issues getting text onto those svg pages without the whole thing going haywire. Go see dama boba. Ew.

[RJP43]

Ahhhh ok make sense to not take the personography suggestion then. Hmmm wonder what the issue is ... is your code pushed here?

[setriplette]

I just pushed. I think the problem has to do with the dimensions of the boba speakers svg. The text won't overlap my svg and there's a big blank space at the bottom of it I'd bet. I am going to mess with it tomorrow (and save a copy somewhere else in case I break it).

[ebeshero]

@setriplette Just had a look at the viz: Have you tried resetting the viewbox on the svg element? I bet it's reaching too low... Try clipping the height back to like 400?

[setriplette]

Did it, still ew. Going to sleep on this one and try a bunch of things tomorrow.

[ebeshero]

Let's take a look at the CSS to see if that'll help. Resources to look at: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_dimension.asp