Final assignment

Final Assignment (finalized 23 Nov)

The NYUAD Arts Center has recently celebrated the 9th season of hosting Rooftop Rhythms in our community, with over 80 performances! Rooftop Rhythms is the longest running open mic night in the Middle East and season 10 will begin this month. Building on our meeting with its producer poet Dorian Paul Rogers in late October, we are going to apply our skills learned this term to analyze a medium-sized corpus drawn from this rich performance tradition.

Rooftop Rhythms will be the subject of a collective final project using four public seasons of Rooftop Rhythms, the recordings of which the Arts Center has shared with me. The seasons are Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020 and Spring 2021. In total they make up, 39.1GB of video files and many hours of recording.

They are particularly compelling as a corpus, since they are contemporary with the moment just before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and the social movement of Black Lives Matter were unfolding across the world.

The project will be written up in five parts which we will work on over a period of several weeks, as subpages of a new tab.

(1) a project plan of 200 words or so. Who will do what when? (done alone or together during the week of 22 November) - ungraded

(2) one small visualization of what you are doing with a few sentences with high level explanations to share with Dorian about your research questions and what you expect to find, or have begun to find. (alone or together, by 1 Dec) - ungraded

(3) We will learn about speech-to-text algorithms and assess the kinds of bias these algorithms exhibit with different varieties of global English, what is often called "accent bias." In order to do an analysis of this phenomenon, we will learn how to remove an audio file from a video and process their captions. Each student will choose a portion of one of the episodes (or portions from multiple episodes) making up about 15-minute segment of recording and will assess how the STT algorithms worked, addressing the following questions:

-Why did you chose the 15 minute segment that you did?

-How would you describe the speakers' way of speaking during this segment?

-What words were recognized? misrecognized?

-Are there patterns of misrecognition?

-How would you qualify the misrecognition (speaker's accent or the complexity or colloquial quality of their words)?

You may choose to visualize portions of the transcript, illustrating which parts are incorrectly transcribed.

(This part should be written up alone and should be the length of a typical response).

(4) In the hybrid reading part of this exercise, I'd like you to use a combination of computer-assisted techniques we learned this term along with attention to detail in the recorded videos.

In this part, you may hone in on parts of the recordings to identify patterns, to the sounds and to whatever you are able to take away from the recording of the event.

This part should use any of the techniques in the class we have learned so far (topic modeling, sentiment analysis, most distinctive words, any of the techniques from Voyant, collocation or keywords from AntConc).

This part of the assignment should be about 1000 words, plus visualizations. Ideally you will refer back to salient concepts in the readings from the semester.

(This part can be done alone or in pairs).

(5) In a reflective essay of 500 words or so about the process of putting together the project, on your larger takeaways about distant reading, a reflection on how you kept to, or changed, the project plan. Topics you might consider include

-how successful/conclusive/easy the study was

- what obstacles there were

- what surprises or conclusions were you faced with

- roles each of you played in the project

- did you stick to you project plan? did it change?

(This part should be done alone).