Project Update 4/1

[cherinacheng]

Caroline began our Thursday night meeting by asking where everyone is regarding completing the markup of their respective Greek tragedy and validating the XML file against our Relax NG schema. Here is where everyone is, as of 12:25 am on April 1st:

• Vidya and Richa had already finished their markup and validated their XML files against our schema (Medea and Libation Bearers)
• Alexis was done with all the markup before our meeting, and her XML was valid against the schema, except for an issue with the gap, which she fixed during the meeting (Philoctetes)
• Cherina was halfway through a final round of markup by the time of the meeting, and she has done more tonight, but is holding off on doing more due to some uncertainties about choices to make. She will try to finish everything as soon as possible (Women of Trachis)

We then discussed markup—to be specific, we talked about the recRel and infRel attribute values, since some of the relationships between people get hard to describe in a succinct fashion. Some thoughts we had about the attribute values:

• Caroline said that we could have consolidated a list to standardize the attribute values we would use in our markup, but that we didn't do that because we were treating the plays as separate—if the plays all feature different relationships when it comes to receiving and inflicting pain, a standardization may not be necessary. However, it's still relevant for cases like "mom" versus "mother."
• Vidya gave an example from her own markup. She chose to use recRel="none" and infRel="none" sometimes, for people who didn't have a substantial relationship with each other. This is relevant because if people don't really have a connection to each other, it's not as important to think about relationships in that context anyways.
• Richa said that we can make a list now, though, in Google Sheets, and Caroline agreed. It will be helpful for us to have it.

Caroline then switched the conversation topic to our web presence:

• Richa added some text to our front page.
• Richa has an idea for a color scheme, but she did not implement it yet because she wanted to talk about it with everyone first. Caroline said that she can do it anyways, because it'll be easier for us to see that way.
• Caroline went over how to add code for our webpages, and said that we don't have to wait to add placeholders for the other pages.

The last main topic we discussed was sub-research questions, which we had been asked to ponder on last week. Here is what we thought:

• Vidya said that we should look at family relationships, because within Medea, pain being inflicted within families/close relationships is what drives the story forward. For this, we would focus on the recRel and infRel attributes.
• Richa said that we can compare our gender attributes to every other attribute, since gender is after all one of the main foci of our research question.
• Vidya said that we should look at the norm attributes too, and I agree with that!
• Richa asked how granular we should be with our analysis; whether we should be focusing on the details with the attribute relationships or pursuing broader questions.
• Vidya said that we should start at the attribute level to uncover the information they provide, which will allow us to better answer broader questions.

For the visualizations, it is possible that we would do something similar to what the Shakespearean Insults team did, since their research question is in a way similar to ours. Caroline also said that Schematron would be useful for us to make sure that and tags are both present for each pain event. We then discussed what we would be helpful for us to work on for next week. Here is the list of who will work on what:

• Schematron for the tags: Vidya
• XSLT for our webpage's reading view: Richa and Alexis
• XSLT for pulling out counts from our markup and putting them into tables: Cherina
• We will think about overall site design (color scheme, layout, etc)

We will not put the entirety of the tragedies into a reading view, because it will be too much text. Caroline also said we may benefit from:

• Using pop-up windows that have all of the attributes we marked a pain event with
• Having filters for results

[BenA03]

This is a really organized project update! When our group was picking a color palette, I found this site really helpful: https://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/RGB_Color.html. Sometimes, default HTML colors don't cut it! This site converts the color you like into hexadecimal, and you can put it in your CSS document with color: #(number); just like you would with a color: red; or color: blue;. This site also offers a really nice list of web-safe colors with previews.