STATUS & SCOPE

Someone (Paul Valery maybe) said: A poem is never finished, only abandoned. Ob&Up is the poem and will have to be (temporarily) abandoned soon — best to do it at a rewarding juncture. The point of temporary abandonment we aim for (i.e., our definition of “done”): a functional website with an operational Bingo game. The website also features content/narrative that details and contextualizes our findings, includes team info, and a link to an accessible corpus on Git Hub. 

The scope of the project is becoming more apparent. As expected, we are finding more questions to pursue in text analysis. The trajectory of text analysis has always been unpredictable. Based on previous experiences working on artistic and literary analysis projects, I know that once analysis begins, deeper layers of analysis present themselves. So at this stage it is less about scaling down an initially too-ambitious scope and more about tempering ever more burgeoning ideas for new queries. 

TEXT ANALYSIS

With that in mind, Teddy and Maria will use this week (until 4/26) to pursue a final round of additional text analysis. Teddy will predominantly work with the full corpora for both seasons. Maria will mostly work with the judging segments of our anchor corpus, season 12. We plan to document our findings with an eye on creating copy for the site and constructing our larger argument.

Next week (until 5/3): We will combine all final text analysis findings to finish the website copy, and Maria will also be revisiting the presentation slides. Teddy will focus on making the corpora available via Git Hub.

BINGO and WEBSITE

Nuraly has finished coding the bingo game’s “outline.”  Now we have to create custom tiles for the 25 fields of the game card. Each tile will feature one typical GBBS judging phrase. Maria has passed the chosen phrases on to RC, and this week, RC will create the tiles and pass them on to Nuraly, who will add them to the bingo game. Nuraly and RC will continue working together to ensure that the bingo plug-in functions as intended on the website. (The bingo’s functionality can and will be tested before the custom tiles are added.)Since we have decided to move the site off the limited Commons version and upgrade to a paid version, RC will continue to work on the site’s infrastructure. There are plenty of technical aspects associated with the upgrade for RC to wrangle, and she will continue to do that this week. 

Next week: RC and Maria will collaborate to implement narrative website content, and Nuraly will begin to reach out to the GBBS Redditors. We might ask them for feedback and input on the game as soon as we can.

Overall, it feels as though we have a grasp on what needs to be done before the launch, and the task list looks (a little) more achievable than daunting.

STATUS & SCOPE

Someone (Paul Valery maybe) said: A poem is never finished, only abandoned. Ob&Up is the poem and will have to be (temporarily) abandoned soon — best to do it at a rewarding juncture. The point of temporary abandonment we aim for (i.e., our definition of “done” ): a functional website with an operational Bingo game. The website also features content/narrative that details and contextualizes our findings, includes team info, and a link to an accessible corpus on Git Hub. 

The scope of the project is becoming more apparent. As expected, we are finding more questions to pursue in text analysis. The trajectory of text analysis has always been unpredictable. Based on previous experiences working on artistic and literary analysis projects, I know that once analysis begins, deeper layers of analysis keep presenting themselves. So at this stage it is less about scaling down an initially too-ambitious scope and more about tempering ever more burgeoning ideas for queries. 

TEXT ANALYSIS

With that in mind, Teddy and Maria will use this week (until 4/26) to pursue a final round of additional text analysis. Teddy will predominantly work with the full corpora for both seasons. Maria will mostly work with the judging segments of our anchor corpus, season 12. We plan to document our findings with an eye on creating copy for the site and constructing our larger argument.

Next week (until 5/3): We will combine all final text analysis findings to finish the website copy, and Maria will also be revisiting the presentation slides. Teddy will focus on making the corpora available via Git Hub.

BINGO and WEBSITE

Nuraly has finished coding the bingo game’s “outline.”  Now we have to create custom tiles for the 25 fields of the game card. Each tile will feature one typical GBBS judging phrase. Maria has passed the chosen phrases on to RC, and this week, RC will create the tiles and pass them on to Nuraly, who will add them to the bingo game. Nuraly and RC will continue working together to ensure that the bingo plug-in functions as intended on the website. (The bingo’s functionality can and will be tested before the custom tiles are added.)Since we have decided to move the site off the limited Commons version and upgrade to a paid version, RC will continue to work on the site’s infrastructure. There are plenty of technical aspects associated with the upgrade for RC to wrangle, and she will continue to do that this week. 

Next week: RC and Maria will collaborate to implement narrative website content, and Nuraly will begin to reach out to the GBBS Redditors. We might ask them for feedback and input on the game as soon as we can.

Overall, it feels as though we have a grasp on what needs to be done before the launch, and the task list looks (a little) more achievable than daunting. 

We’ve managed to make it to our midpoint meeting (yesterday)!

TEXT ANALYSIS & DATA

Corpus for Season 2 and Season 12 are cleaned, tended to, and ready to be used and analyzed (further). Teddy was able to start the analysis of Season 12, and Maria was able to do initial queries on Season 2. We found some fundamental confirmations of our suspicions. The vocabulary focuses on the appearance and flavor of the bakes. Smell and texture are far less frequently mentioned. We also noticed that the vocabulary truly is limited. “Lovely,” “nice,” delicious” feature heavily in both seasons of judging language. Another discovery was the super-usage of “very” in Season 2 as a sort of calibration word: See the use of “very good.” or “very, very, good” or even “very very very good” to create, um, nuance. The small words we might have glossed over are actually turning out to be the words that corroborate our thesis. There’s also an emerging new theory about the words and short phrases that have become emblematic of GBBS, like “overbaked”, “soggy bottom,” “stodgy” etc. Right now, the suspicion is that they appear in the show at a middle frequency; they stick out just enough to become signature words. These are words we also see most often as part of GBBS memes (which: selected memes to be added to future presentations for our audience’s pleasure). The next few weeks will be about following our hunches into a more detailed analysis. Perhaps, we’ll also collect some overall statistics describing the vocabulary size and the average length of judging sentences. 

Teddy and Maria haven’t yet been able to combine and compare their findings and run deliberate comparison queries. Achieving this is also on the agenda for the next corpus meeting on April 16th. Additionally, Teddy will ensure that the GitHub repository is ready to be linked to the site by late April.

As we pass the semester’s midpoint, a potential plan to include a third comparison corpus from a different show has been abandoned. We will have enough to do with looking into the details of S2 and S12, and there are many more paths to follow with these corpora than we might have initially predicted.

SITE & GAME

We’ve also decided to take one or two striking findings and render them visually in a way that can be easily distinguished from Voyant’s renderings and is more consistent with the style of our website. RC will spearhead this effort once we turn the necessary info over to her. Until then, RC continues to work with Nuraly to find a way to integrate plug-ins so the Bingo game will work. After discovering that CUNY’s version won’t suffice, RC has upgraded to a non-CUNY business version (a cheaper alternative is also still in consideration). Initial trials of plug-ins were promising—more tbd. 

RC will work on making a logo for Ob&Up and continue to develop the site. Maria will finalize the broader aspects of site content with RC (final tab-names, i.e., what will be included and what won’t be included) around by mid-April.

Nuraly will stay in contact with RC and continue to develop and test the Bingo game. Once Teddy and Maria have finished the text analysis, Nuraly will be able to populate the game squares with verbal content. He will also keep an eye on social media activity around GBBS/GBBO and share the finished Bingo game with the GBBS Subreddit.

OVERALL

Our various life circumstances and work obligations sometimes pose problems for communication and collaboration. Ideally, Teddy and Maria would have found more time to collaborate directly on text analysis, but since their schedules didn’t align, getting on the same page has been difficult. There also are recurring questions about when and how documents get shared and okayed by the group. Clarifying workflow, submission rhythms, and check-in modes might make sense for our first meeting post-break, especially as we head into the final frenzy.

But, overall, we’ve (mostly) met our milestones and are gearing up for a strong finish post-break.

After laying the conceptual groundwork for the project, we are now in the midst of the text-preparation phase. Over the past weeks, we were able to find near-complete transcripts for two seasons of GBBS (Season 2 and Season 12). Ruby then pre-cleaned the transcripts with Python, and now Teddy and Maria are double-cleaning the files by re/watching the show and comparing the transcript to the broadcast (and making corrections when necessary).

Teddy recently finalized the corpus for season 12, exported it to a CSV file, and, until next week, is separating out the judging sections and readying the corpus for analysis. They will also create a GitHub repository for our data.

The comparison corpus (Season 2) still needs to be double-cleaned/compared to the broadcast. Maria will focus on that for the coming week.

Our goal to have preliminary findings by our March 29 midpoint meeting remains realistic. As noted in our planning post, the focus of the final month (April) will be heavily influenced by our discoveries ahead.

[Finding a third comparison corpus from an American baking show, is not a priority at this point. But it’s not off the table entirely. For now, it is something we might return to later in the semester. Largely this is contingent on finding an appropriate American show we have easy access to.]

Meanwhile, RC has been making great progress on our website. She has created a first functional version of the site and is refining the design and structure and continuing to figure out the possibilities of the WordPress platform.

Since the site will predominantly feature the game/s, the landing page currently shows placeholders. The placeholders will remain for the coming weeks while we focus on “behind the scenes” aspects of the site. This means RC will check in with Nuraly, who is working on the game component and investigating ways to incorporate interactive game versions.
Nuraly is considering two options: Option 1 is to code a Bingo and trivia game from scratch; option 2 is using pre-existing code via an existing platform and linking that to our WordPress site. There are quite a few sites that offer plug-ins, so pursuing option 2 might be advantageous. Nuraly’s research and experiments over the next week/s will determine the route we take.

Overall, this is a very practical & technical (as opposed to conceptual) phase of the project. Our heads are down; we’re focusing on the details of spreadsheets, platforms, and game codes and (whenever applicable) developing the skills associated with our tasks.

>Audience

The target audience for this project is two-fold. Any (more than casual) fans of GBBS —e.g., people who have shared memes or caught themselves pronouncing a random piece of pastry “stodgy” in a perhaps fake British accent— should find Ob&Up intriguing, as should linguistics and other linguistically interested academics in media studies, literature, and beyond. 

These two groups are, of course, not mutually exclusive and are likely already involved in ongoing exchanges. Existing language-focused public engagement via word games and puzzles, language-usage quizzes, etc. shows that the channels of communication between the media-consuming public and language experts are naturally present. Ob&Up wants to consciously build on overlaps between playful engagement with language and academic research by reaching and connecting these two differently motivated curiosities with an analysis of GBBS judging language communicated, partially, in game form.

>Outreach Strategy, General 

There is a core group of these constituents that we aim to reach out to first for our project launch in May. Beyond May, the game component of the project (Bingo, trivia) can serve as the locus for expansion to a broader user base. Targeted outreach to more casual fans of the show should go hand-in-hand with the release of a new season of GBBS on Netflix (which will be available for streaming in late October 2023). When the show re-enters public discourse as part of its broadcasting/streaming cycle, intensified outreach at this time can expand the project’s audience and re-engage initial audiences.

>Social Media Strategy

The project team plans to establish a social media presence before the site’s initial launch. Broadly, our social media outreach will unfold in two stages. Stage 1 for the May launch and Stage 2 for a re/launch in the fall. 

For the May launch, the project team will reach out on a smaller scale. We will connect with GBBS fan communities, primarily via Reddit, where active discussion of the show continues to take place. According to our preliminary research, Reddit users will be an ideal first audience to test the project website and give feedback on games and other content. A user profile has already been created, and Nuraly has been following/observing relevant subreddits. By mid-April (once we can build on the initial findings of our corpus analysis), we may jump into conversations and insert teasers/previews of our language analysis. In conjunction with Reddit, for the May launch, Teddy will use his TikTok presence to inform followers,  which include linguists and linguistically interested people.

Based on initial responses and public feedback, a more extensive outreach strategy will be developed for the fall, Stage 2. Facebook and TikTok are platforms with generationally distinct GBBS fan communities; outreach via these platforms will be included in Phase 2. Simple games might also be adapted for cellphone usability. “Judge this Bake” Bingo, word-of-the-day judgment trivia, and statistical findings shared as various platforms could all incite and continue the dialogue around evaluative language and its role on social media. 

Geographically speaking, we will focus on GBBS communities, which are coded as US-based, although we continue to research differences in reach between GBBO (the British acronym) and GBBS-related hashtags and communities and can appeal to both.

>Website and Additional Communication 

Website

         The project will primarily exist as a website that consolidates the academic and entertainment components, i.e., the visualized corpora, the interactive game/s, and texts on the project’s aim and background. While the visualization of the corpora and the game/s will be the focus of the landing page, academic texts detailing methods and findings will be an essential part of the site as well. They will be available in specifically dedicated sections of the site, along with other ancillary material. 

Additional Communication

        Essays (or Op-Eds) that reflect and interpret the findings of our text analysis phase will be submitted to online publications like Eater and Vulture, which feature cultural criticism focusing on food and TV, respectively. The project team might also reach out to podcasts on linguistic phenomena, like Slate’s Spectacular Vernacular. Contacting GBBS directly and letting them know about the project is also potentially an option. 

A preliminary note on Accessibility (more on this next week)

The basic fundamental design of the website relies on a limited and high-contrast color palette and language rendered visually in readily readable fonts. The game designs will be minimalist. A visual simplicity will support the project’s focus on language and simultaneously lower access barriers.

Below is our Data Management Plan.

Ruby worked with the DMP template to make sure all aspects are considered, and Teddy supplied crucial answers.

DMP_Overbaked_and_Underproofed