We have a few research questions that guide our markup:
We are using a binary definition of gender. Additionally, we are looking at these greek tragedies in a vacuum, not looking at these tragedies in the context of preceding plays.
We are using four greek tragedies for our analysis:
The first two plays, Libation Bearers and Medea, were selected because they depict women in pain. Philoctetes and Women of Trachis depict men in pain. This way, we have enough data to make conclusios about women's and men's pain.
We hope to find out how depictions of pain vary across gender and how greek tragedies portray inflicting pain across gender as well.
Since events of pain can span more than one speech or paragraph and create hierarchy problems, we do not use <pain> elements to wrap events of pain, but we use Trojan milestones <painStart/> and <painEnd/>. Each painStart element starts at the beginning of an instance of pain being described or acted out in the greek tragedy. The attributes for each painStart are as follows;
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| rec | receiver, indicates the name of who is experiencing pain, required in all |
| recGen | gender of receiver, indicates the binary gender of the character who is experiencing pain, possible values are man, woman, and mix for a mixed group of individuals, required in all |
| recNorm | whether the character experiencing pain fits the general norms of Greek society, from the perspective of the original Greek audience of the tragedy; when a receiver of pain would not be socially accepted in Greek society, this value is no and otherwise yes, required in all |
| painType | the type of pain being experienced, possible values are em for emotional, phys for physical, and both for both kinds of pain at once in one event, required in all |
| inf | inflictor, the name of who is inflicting pain, in the case of a nonhuman inflictor this can only take the values of disease or naturerequired when someone is inflicting pain, but not in all |
| infGen | gender of inflictor, the gender of the person inflicting pain, possible values are man, woman, or mix for a mixed group of people, required for all that have an inf |
| infNorm | whether the character inflicting pain fits the general norms of Greek society, from the perspective of the original Greek audience of the tragedy, when a receiver of pain would not be socially accepted in Greek society, this value is no and otherwise yes, required for all that have an inf |
| recRel | relation of receiver to inflictor, required for all that have inf |
| infRel | relation of inflictor to receiver, required for all that have inf |
| direct | whether the pain that is being inflicted is direct or not, possible values are yes if the pain is directly caused by the inflictor or no if the pain is indirectly caused; required for all that have inf |
<painStart rec="Agamemnon" recGen="man" recNorm="yes" painType="both" recRel="husband" inf="Clytamnestra" infGen="woman" infNorm="no" infRel="wife"/> OR<painStart rec="society" recGen="mix" recNorm="yes" painType="both"/>OR<painStart rec="Electra" recGen="woman" recNorm="yes" painType="phys" inf = "disease"