How would you analyze and present the data? Do you have different ideas now that you have full access to the data?

After learning more about the CFRP records, I believe the method of analyzing data that Nicole and I came up with is still a good idea. According to the researcher, his team determined that the irregular handwriting of the records makes it difficult to parse the data through machine vision. Thus, I believe that organizing the records into piles of relatively similar formats as well as having humans enter the numbers is the most feasible approach.

I would still present the data as an IMDB-styled website with a page dedicated to each play and theatre. However, I would expand the analytical abilities of the website to make it more useful for scholars to quantitatively analyze the data.

What kind of scholarly tools would you be building?

To make the presentation of the data useful for scholars, I would include several data analysis tools. One would be an application that can generate bar graphs of data by allowing the user to choose an independent variable, such as ‘Time’, and a dependent variable, such as ‘Revenue’. I would also include an expandable tree graph where researchers can browse through all the plays for which we have data. The first layer of this tree diagram could allow the user to select a year, the second layer could display available theatres, and the third layer can display a list of matching performances. Lastly, I would include a tool that can calculate statistics specified by the user’s search criteria. For example, a researcher could use this tool to find the total revenue generated in a set of theatres during the years 1700-1730.

How would you draw a public audience into the project?

I believe the accessibility and design of the project would help draw a public audience. Because the website will be inspired by the structure of modern movie websites, audiences will find it intuitive to navigate. Furthermore, I would design the website with a pleasing aesthetic appearance typical of commercial websites that aim to attract the casual audience, rather than the plain design that a more academic website might have. To increase my audience I would use a reasonable portion of my budget to take advantage of advertising programs such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

What might be some of the technical challenges for your approach?

The technical challenges to my approach would be data entry and algorithmic correctness. Because the records number in the thousands, it would take months to enter the data into our system, much like it did for the real life researchers. Furthermore, because of the advanced capabilities of the research tools I am proposing, it would be important to make sure the data analysis algorithms involved are correct. To avoid creating buggy code that could produce false data, we would make use of existing code libraries and implement unit and integration software testing.