We as a group learned many things while working on encoding More Beast (For Worse Children) By Hilaire Belloc. Hilaire Belloc was known for his prose and for writing with both wit and clarity. We learned during coding how to identify patterns within the poems and pull interesting information from them as well. We were able to do that by using our knowledge and skills of XML to mark them up with what we found to be interesting, then using Xpath to decipher them all to see what patterns we came up with and then by using XSLT to turn that information into HTML to display for everyone to see.
In our markup of the poems, the main things we identified were beasts, people, locations, emotions, actions, adjectives/descriptions, and events. For the latter four, we applied a connotation to one of them if we thought the text had a positve or negative connotaion or emotion to it. Positve and negative text, along with beasts, people, and locations, are each highlighted in the reading view on our website with distinct colors. As can be seen on our analysis page, almost all of the poems have more negative text than positve. This may be a testament to how dangerous and/or unpleasant many of the beasts are, or perhaps it is an indication of Hilaire Belloc's cynical sense of humor. Regardless, this collection of poems made for an interesting analysis.
We also found it interesting that in the illustrations some of the beasts have human-like features, which made us wonder if the beasts were the animals or the humans. Perhaps there is deeper commentary going on than we initially thought. Or maybe it is just a silly children's book.
Project Leader & Designer/Coder
Jiayuan Wen is a senior here at Penn state Beherend that major's in Computer Science, he has deep passion for video games and art. Starting off as software engineer, plans to develop VFX/3D animation for career path.
● Created schema for poem documents.
● Created XSLT for fulltext creation.
● Encoded poem XML documents.
● Refined project site stylesheet.
Designer/Coder
Myeisha Frost is a junior here at Penn State Behrend majoring in English, she has a passion for problem solving and web design.
● Designed project site visual.
● Created stylesheet for project site.
● Gathered poem illustrations.
● Refined schema for poem documents
● Refined poem XML documents
Designer/Coder
Graydon Kupfer is a junior at Penn State Behrend. He is majoring in DIGIT and minoring in Game Development. He is currently a Schreyer Honors student. He enjoys playing video games and watching movies.
● Prepared poem text documents.
● Encoded poem XML documents.
● Refined schema for poem documents.
● Refined XSLT for fulltext creation.
● Refined XML encoding for poems.
● Refined project site codes.
Designer/Coder
Jermaine Shields is a senior here at Penn State Behrend thats majors in DIGIT, he has passion for video games and Graphical design. he started off as a Software Engineering Major and has plans to develop graphical designs and code/develop his own video game.
● Encoded poem documents.
● Embedded poem illustrations to project site.
● Refined project site visuals.
● Refined project schema.
● Encoded and refined poem XML documents.