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.