Methodology
Book Markup
The book markup began with XML tagging through the use of regular expressions. All characters were tagged through regular expressions and then manually after for nicknames/mentions that might have been missed in the regular expressions. Each character was given an attribute that aligns with the musical markup. A schema was developed to ensure the validity of the markup, as well as group character names. As mentioned in the Russian Naming Conventions section in the ‘ABOUT’ tab, the characters in the novel are referred to by multiple names depending on who addresses them. The text of War and Peace was found online at “Project Gutenberg” and already contained markup of the text including books, book titles, chapter, chapter titles, paragraphs, and quotations.
Music Markup
The musical markup consisted of XML tagging of the speakers, stanzas, choruses/verses, characters, spoken action, and references to War and Peace through the use of regular expressions. A schema was developed to ensure the validity of the markup and group character names, similar to the book markup. The musical lyrics were found online at “Genius Lyrics.”
XSLT and SVG
XSLT and SVG To visualize our data, we used XSL to produce the graphs that showed the outcome of our research. We used SVG to upload our graphs onto our website, so as users could see the outcome of data collection as well. As the coding was completed in XSLT, we had to draw on other files such as the Book 8 file and each song from The Great Comet to be able to access what was originally marked up in each file. From there, we were able to create the data visualizations that can be seen under the 'ANALYSIS" tab.
The PROGRAM Tab
One of our unique struggles in our research was attempting to visually represent the characters' relationships to one another-- something that the book and play both do in concrete (but hard to quantify) ways. Our data-based visualizations on our analysis page certainly helped-- but such graphs are limited to communicating relationships numerically. An essential piece of this story is the social relationships. In order to visualize these, we took a page out of the play's book (pun intended) and created a virtual version of the playbill's graphic using SVG. With arrows labeled to indicate how characters are connected, this graph is able to communicate what our more empirical ones could not, and lets our user base familiarize themselves with the text in an interactive and research-friendly manner.