This week for my final project I made a lot of progress. The main areas I progressed in were with my research on programming for text analysis (digital) and with further clarifying what specifically my project is attempting to do (humanities).

Digital—- For the programming aspect of my assignment I first needed access to the text I am going to analyze. This was not difficult, and with Prof Hemphill’s help, I was able to find out that The Internet Movie Script Database has all of the scripts I need. For the program itself I reviewed notes from my Data Structures class and was able to find an example my professor did with a program that read and processed text. I plan to alter this program so that I can make a Python dictionary, and store each character to a slot in the dictionary, then, I will run a word count to count how often each character speaks. I plan to also have another dictionary that stores the information from the first dictionary but has the characters grouped by race. I’m going to use the Evelina Gabasova blog where she analyzed Star Wars as an additional reference. I will do more research on using Python for text analysis, and I plan to begin writing pseudocode for this program sometime this week.

Humanities—- For the more humanities side of my project, I began separating each character into a group based on race. Some struggles I ran into were with deciding on ethnicity vs race. I came to the conclusion that characterizing each character by ethnicity would be exhausting and difficult for me to accomplish as a solo-researcher. Something else I realized, was that if my project is going to compare diversity amongst the different movies, I’m going to have to come up with a comprehensive definition of diversity to refer to.

I made a lot of progress this week with clarification, my main goal right now is to get a draft of my program up and running so I can start testing for bugs. Something else I need to begin thinking about is how I want to present this information. I’m thinking making a blog post like the Evelina Gabasova oen would be incredible, and designing an infographic to represent my data in a clear and visual way is somehing else I’m planning on doing (I guess this will require me to dust off my Photoshop/GIMP skills to make something mildly impressive). I’m just really excited to see what my data will reveal, and I want to present it in the best way possible! Stay tuned for more updates!

Sources:

The Internet Movie Script Database: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-A-New-Hope.html

Gabasova, Evelina. 2015. “The Star Wars Social Network”. http://evelinag.com/blog/2015/12-15-star-wars-social-network/#.WBd0dforK00