Project Update for the Week of February 14th (meeting on February 17th)

[cherinacheng]

Prior to this week's meeting, we had been hoping to go with the project that Richa proposed, but it seemed like it was going to be difficult to go forward with it, so we decided to change. After discussing at length, we settled on doing the project that Vidya had proposed, which is about the gendered language of pain in Greek tragedy.

In this project, we aim to see what kind of language is used around pain in four different Greek tragedies, depending if the person experiencing pain is male or female. We want to analyze both the language used by the people in pain, as well as the language used by people who are observing the painful situation. Vidya and Richa, who both have majors in anthropology, are familiar with certain anthropological ideas about pain, such as embodied pain, and how pain relates to ontology and people's social statuses, so they plan to get together to talk about how we can use these ideas to create a consistent tagging system for the XML versions of our plays.

The four plays we are analyzing are Medea, Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, and Libation Bearers. These were chosen strategically based on whose pain is prominent in the play—for example, Medea is about a woman's pain. Because there are four team members, each of us will focus on one play. Vidya will focus on Medea, Cherina will focus on Women of Trachis, Richa will focus on Libation Bearers, and Alexis will focus on Philoctetes.

We discovered that there doesn't seem to be a full XML version of Medea, so Vidya contacted the people at the Perseus Digital Library to ask about it. The main plans that we made during this week were for each of us to read our assigned play for the next week, and start doing initial document analysis.

Analysis of these four plays will likely involve topic modeling at some point, though we have yet to finalize the details of how we will be displaying our data.

[scanney]

Our project is also focusing on gendered versions of speech (also action) in text, how did you decide how much to include in your tags of markup for pain? For example, some instances you would only tag one word versus tag a whole line of text. I found it difficult to discern how much each tag should include because sometimes a entire sentence was necessary. Also, what types of words/phrases are you looking to tag to depict pain? I am curious what your methodology looks like and if you will include a degree to which the 'pain' is categorized? In our group we did this for actions (willingness, agency) using attributes and attribute values. I think this might be helpful for your project as well because it helped to clear up some confusion for us as to the different reasons for, in our case, actions or descriptions being positive or negative--but in your project it may solely be the degrees of pain and causality for male vs. female. Do you have a research question you are looking to answer or are you more generally looking at the presence of pain in the plays and whether it is experienced by males or females?

[BenA03]

I am also really interested in this project, and echo a lot of Sydni's questions. Additionally, something in your project meeting that I found very interesting was your process of tagging the stories for "deserved and undeserved pain". In my group's project, we were tasked with deciding if certain stories had happy endings, which we found much more nuanced than we thought it would be, since it depends on which character's perspective you adopted. Similarly, how did you go about determining deserved or undeserved pain? For example, is the pain experienced by an antagonist always deserved? I have not read the plays you are analyzing, and wonder if an ambiguous villain might make this idea harder to markup. One strategy that was useful to my group and might help yours is to consider deserving or undeserving from the fixed perspective of the main protagonist. This eliminates some of the ambiguity of trying to understand the unique position of every character.

If it becomes one of your research questions, I would be very interested in seeing whether emotional pain tends to be more deserved or undeserved than physical pain. My guess is that emotional pain is less deserved, as a lot of emotional pain in stories derive from some form uncontrollable loss, but I am curious to see what actually holds true!

[caelingrambau]

This project sounds really interesting! Are you guys using any specific translations of these works? I would be interested to see how gendered pain plays out via translation. Our project focuses on a semi-similar sort of markup with our breakdown of Revelations and Psalms in the Bible. I would be very interested to see if any of the language used is similar to any of the phrasing used in our own texts, being as they both share a similar context of emotional language. In that same vein, we are focusing specifically on violence as one of our tones for emotional language. I would be interested to see if any of the words or phrases that your team comes up with as associated with pain overlap, whether in phrasing or examples, in our team's research on the Bible.

As far as tagging goes, we have found attributes to be really helpful in our markup. If you take a look at our updated methodology you might be able to use some of the ideas that we have implemented in our own markup to specify the emotions and tones in correlation with our emotional language tagged. Hopefully that can help you get a bit of a jumpstart on your work!