Digital Projects



Projects

While pursuing my Digital Studies Certificate, I will be contributing to the creation of publically-accessible digital projects. Below are descriptions and links to each of the projects.


The Hamilton Project

The Hamilton Project is an ongoing project that analyses the well known musical Hamilton: An American Musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda. This show follows the life of Alexander Hamilton, America's first secretary of state, as he fights during the Revolutionary War and moves into politics during the United States' early years. This project looks at two main things: the lyrics and the historical accuracy of the text.

As the originating project leader, I and my team member, Bri Filer, initially analyzed the lyrics in Hamilton. We digitized all of the songs together, tagging names, places, dates, and themes as we went, and then worked separately to achieve all of our data. Bri was tasked with finding different frequency values. We were interested in the number of times a character spoke, the number times a character was talked about, and who was talking about who. We repesented this data using network graphs, created by Bri, and a personaography table I created.

I worked on tracking the themes throughout the musical. We picked out eight prominant words/phrases we thought represented important themes in the show. I created a line graph and accompanying table that tracked the frequency of each phrase in individual songs and throughout the entire text.


Onstage Feelings, Offstage Thoughts

As part of a Digital Storytelling class, I created a public blog, known as Onstage Feelings, Offstage Thoughts. This blog focuses on the performing arts, including music, acting, and dancing. In blog posts I discuss various topics and share personal stories about my experience as both a performer and an audience member. I also feature reviews of soundtracks and shows. A main component of my site is including other media, such as photos, gifs, and videos, to help attract readers.


The Lope de Vega Project

The Lope de Vega Project is an ongoing project that examines texts written in both English and Spanish by early modern Spanish playwright FĂ©lix Lope de Vega y Carpio (1562-1635). The aim of the project is to identify emotions, body parts, and gender in several of his works available to public domain.I was one of three founding members of the project. Each of us worked on a separate text. I took on an English translation of The Pilgrim of Castile, one of his more rare prose pieces. A novel split into four books, it follows the story of a Pilgrim as he travels Europe and listens to stories told by people he meets.

On my text specificaly, I created structural mark-up and analyzed the text in order to tag places, people, emotion, and body parts. I had to distinguish between people who were characters, mythical, fictional, and historical and give a short descriptions of each mythical, fictional, and historical people. I also had to distinguish parts of speech when tagging emotions. Using the information I gathered while tagging emotions, I created and SVG graph to visually represent the data. Aside from working on my own text, I added Java script to several other parts of the website so users could interact by selecting checkboxes that would highlight words, names or phrases.