Hi all! Long-time troper fan here. I figured this topic should go here because you'd appreciate it best. OK, here goes...*deep breath*
Do you ever listen to how things are said, and think, There's a pattern there just *waiting* to be taken down?
I wanted to create a "quotation analysis type system". What I mean is, *How* quotes are spoken/acted out as opposed to just written down. There's been a lot analysis into English "prosody" & "intonation" but no large database created by English speakers themselves.
Since TV tropes is just about the most impressive structuralist database of any kind I've ever seen, I was thinking that maybe people would be interested in trying this sort of thing. The electronic medium is sooooo much better suited to this than traditional publishing it's not funny.
What we would start with are spoken audio files, on a wiki with a tagging system, and we would try to find similar quotations' patterns in various media formats. This way, we would build up exemplars and references and improve on it from there; I would expect most of the analysis would come from me, and I've already started digging into this on my own, on my desktop with Wikidpad. The basis for it, though, would be our own speech—we would be the voice actors for all of the recordings.
We would start with such-and-such quote, and people would try to produce their own statements said in a similar way—and then we would tag all the examples for whatever patterns they contained.
I would like to stay away from specific theories, so the tags would have to be generated by other users. If people could use impressionistic/emotive labels that would probably not be bad, but eventually I would expect people would pick up the structures themselves in very particular ways & find their own way(s) to label them. There /are/ various analyses e.g. the British tradition/Bolinger who pick out certain features as primitive, but it is tricky where to draw the line. I would like to stay away from making the wiki specifically theory-dependent, so discussions of autosegmental-metrical theory, if those people should show up, should go on the talk/discussion pages, or otherwise find a better way of drawing out correspondences to other similar structures that people might not associate with each other. In other words, I would expect to eventually merge certain parts of the wiki, depending on where theory eventually leads—or not. The audio analysis should come first.
Of course, tags could reflect various theories, so long as taggers within a theory agreed on their use, and people who didn't like using say, the A-M approach could ignore A-M tags.
All that said, there would need to be a consensus when it came to how things were said/heard—so it's possible we could have different parts of the wiki dedicated to different accents. If people can at least hear their own accent, then that should work well.
I was going to create a wiki on Wikispaces for all this. Please let me know if all this makes sense to people. I like to think intonation is something most everybody can understand.
Hi all! Long-time troper fan here. I figured this topic should go here because you'd appreciate it best. OK, here goes...*deep breath*
Do you ever listen to how things are said, and think, There's a pattern there just *waiting* to be taken down?
I wanted to create a "quotation analysis type system". What I mean is, *How* quotes are spoken/acted out as opposed to just written down. There's been a lot analysis into English "prosody" & "intonation" but no large database created by English speakers themselves.
Since TV tropes is just about the most impressive structuralist database of any kind I've ever seen, I was thinking that maybe people would be interested in trying this sort of thing. The electronic medium is sooooo much better suited to this than traditional publishing it's not funny.
What we would start with are spoken audio files, on a wiki with a tagging system, and we would try to find similar quotations' patterns in various media formats. This way, we would build up exemplars and references and improve on it from there; I would expect most of the analysis would come from me, and I've already started digging into this on my own, on my desktop with Wikidpad. The basis for it, though, would be our own speech—we would be the voice actors for all of the recordings.
We would start with such-and-such quote, and people would try to produce their own statements said in a similar way—and then we would tag all the examples for whatever patterns they contained.
I would like to stay away from specific theories, so the tags would have to be generated by other users. If people could use impressionistic/emotive labels that would probably not be bad, but eventually I would expect people would pick up the structures themselves in very particular ways & find their own way(s) to label them. There /are/ various analyses e.g. the British tradition/Bolinger who pick out certain features as primitive, but it is tricky where to draw the line. I would like to stay away from making the wiki specifically theory-dependent, so discussions of autosegmental-metrical theory, if those people should show up, should go on the talk/discussion pages, or otherwise find a better way of drawing out correspondences to other similar structures that people might not associate with each other. In other words, I would expect to eventually merge certain parts of the wiki, depending on where theory eventually leads—or not. The audio analysis should come first. Of course, tags could reflect various theories, so long as taggers within a theory agreed on their use, and people who didn't like using say, the A-M approach could ignore A-M tags.
All that said, there would need to be a consensus when it came to how things were said/heard—so it's possible we could have different parts of the wiki dedicated to different accents. If people can at least hear their own accent, then that should work well.
I was going to create a wiki on Wikispaces for all this. Please let me know if all this makes sense to people. I like to think intonation is something most everybody can understand.