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.