Editorial Methodology

[wdjacca]

All of the radio scripts came from the Generic Radio Workshop, which provide a downloadable TXT file that includes only the body of the scripts and exclude the metadata that is commonly shown on the top of the webpage. To generate the corpus, I copied the metadata portion into the TXT files that I downloaded. While doing so, I noticed that the metadata almost always starts with "series", "show", "date" and "cast". For this reason, I made the Relax NG schema code restrict the order of the elements , , , and . There were some discrepancies between the layout of some of the files, most troubling being "Murder in Casbath".

Known differences between the files include:

• cast list being put after fx list
• not all scripts include a fx list
• most scripts have a regular pattern of SOUND/MUSIC: indicating the start of a sound effect or musical tune, some have SOUND FX or lowercase
• typos such as ; for :, and FC instead of FX
• some files have notes before cast list, some have them after cast list, some don't have notes at all

Discrepancies also occur within the file, mainly being that not all spoken lines have a speaker tag, some lines were spoken by the same speaker but depicted as separate lines in the files. To counter these, I added a <lineGrp>element that wraps around the spilt lines, which are tagged with <line> elements. The overall speech is wrapped with <ln>, which is consistent with all other speeches in the script to ensure that querying can be performed on the scripts with relative ease.

To regularize the scripts to ensure that queries could be performed on them in the future, and after double checking that the changes will not affect the analysis of the scripts, I moved the metadata elements to be in the same order throughout the corpus. I also removed the SOUND/MUSIC tags from the script itself since the element tags <sound>and <music> serve the same purpose and can be regularized.

[wdjacca]

Rewriting to publish on website

The radio scripts were sourced from the Generic Radio Workshop, where there were downloadable plain text (.txt) files that includes the body contents of the scripts. For the purpose of this research, metadata that was excluded from the plain text files at the top of the webpage display were also included into the files. There was a regular pattern of "series", "show", "date", and "cast", which led to the decision of strictly limiting the Relax NG schema code in this specific order. There were some discrepancies within the files, most notably being with "Murder in Casbah".

There were some major differences in the structure of the files in the radio script corpus, that being of:

• some scripts included a sound effect and special effects list
• some scripts have notes that indicate the author or special notes
• the order of the elements in the metadata columns would be different depending on whether there was a sound effect and special effect list, and notes
• while most scripts have the regular pattern of [SOUND/MUSIC:] to indicate the start of a sound effect or musical tune, some have [SOUND FX] or [music]
• there were minor typos such as ; and FC
• some lines do not have a speaker attached, most likely being part of a larger paragraph of speech that was broken into separate lines in the script

The content in the files in the corpus had to be regularized so that queries could be performed easily on them in the future, taking into consideration that any changes would not affect the contextual or structural analysis of the project.

The following changes to the corpus were made:

• a <lineGrp> element was added to wrap around the spilt lines
• a <line> element was added to wrap around the lines in <lineGrp> to preserve the original structure of the script
• all lines were wrapped in <ln> for consistency
• all metadata elements were formatted to be in the same order, regardless of the order it was in the original text
• SOUND/MUSIC tags from the original text were removed since <sound> and <music> served the same purpose.