CFRP Awards

Project Members

Zygimantas Straznickas, Nicole Seo, Karrie Peterson

Goal of Prototype/Questions Answered:

Our group wanted to explore how we can make the CFRP more accessible to the general public. Specifically, how can we enable non-experts to expore general interest trends within this data – e.g., popularity of plays, of authors, of actors?

Today’s audiences often think in terms of awards, box office profits, top-billed celebrity performers. We wanted to create a website that would put the CFRP data into these kinds of terms.

Our Approach

What we did to achieve this goal was to create an award generator–in the style of the Academy Awards. We really processed the data, so that users could easily peruse the world of old French theatre. Other CFRP tools we have seen keep the data very much intact, allowing the user to do what they want with it. We took a different approach, by using the data to tell a story in modern day terms.

Intended Audience

Our intended audience is the general public–people who don’t know a lot about the Comédie-Française but are perhaps Francophiles or theatre enthusiasts. The site will give these people an easy entry point into the world of 17th-18th century French theatre. They will learn some of the big names of the time and get a general sense of who’s who.

Obstacles, Regrets, and Lessons

  • Obstacles: It was a challege to decide exactly how we wanted to fit the Academy Awards metaphor to this data that was not made for the Oscards. It was also challenging thinking about how to included awards about different actors/actresses due to limitations of the CFRP API (a challenge we weren’t able to overcome in two iterations).
  • Regrets: We regret that we weren’t able to explore other API’s in order to include more information that would bring these awards to life (e.g. critic reviews, plot summaries, date context, etc.). The point of the site was to interest the general public, and a little more information is probably necessary to do this.
  • Lessons: Your vision is often limited by your data.