This week we faced a couple of unforeseeable stumbling blocks. Nuraly has been working on the Bingo game, and just as he had been getting ready to test it, he wasn’t able to actually plug it into the site. For inexplicable reasons, the professional plan for our WordPress site had lapsed. So Ruby had to figure out why the plan had been terminated and then remedy the situation. Then she had to coordinate with Nuraly again, so he could finally test the plug-in. Now, this would not be a tragedy if we had more flexibility in our schedules. But the people in our group do not. So even a small snag like this can potentially cost days. [Can you tell the project manager is writing this post? The project manager periodically has nightmares about snags causing avalanche-sized delays.]

Finally, during class yesterday, we were able to look at the bingo plugin, and while the confetti and the general layout of the game are splendid, we haven’t been able to figure out how to reset the game or how to play it directly on the site (it currently shifts over to a separate window).  Nuraly had an emergency and couldn’t make it to class yesterday, so we weren’t able to address the snag in class (with others like Filipa around, we could have asked for help). We’ll solve it with delay.

Overall though, being in person again really helped us get on the same page. Teddy has begun to move deeper into text analysis, and we could talk through what we consider stop words and what conclusions we’re drawing. Maria is preparing to package our findings into a cohesive narrative, and Teddy will continue the analysis for a little longer. Maria will try to expand the narrative to incorporate additional findings until the last possible moment. Teddy and Maria be in contact via Slack over the next few days to query any urgent last-minute questions. Teddy will also make sure that the data is available on GitHub. Meanwhile, Maria will also finish preparing the presentation slides and coordinate with Ruby to accomplish implementing site content. 

While sitting together and casually talking about our findings and the pitfalls of our corpora, Ruby had the idea for what we ultimately termed a “judgment barometer.” It will be a visual that shows the spectrum of expressions on an axis from very negative -> negative -> neutral -> positive -> superlative. We’re planning on creating it. It begins with Maria passing a list of judgment expressions to Ruby. Let’s see if we can get it done! On & up-ward!!

^ the triple VERY would be on the superlative end of the barometer.