Our research questions were central to our methods. Additionally, our research was guided by our understanding of patriarchy and sexism. We wanted to explore whether traditional tropes of sexism exhibited themselves through pain, specifically from the perspective of the original intended audience. By examining how pain is portrayed, inflicted, and experienced, we hope to understand how sexism operates in Greek tragedies. Our exploratory analysis and markup were guided by these research questions:
We are using a binary definition of gender, and we are looking at the greek tragedies we planned to analyze in a vacuum. In other words, we didn't look at these tragedies in context of the preceding plays.
Alexis, an English Writing major with a minor in Film Studies, is a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh. She joined this class, with no prior knowledge of coding, to fulfill a Quantitative Reasoning requirement in her degree. While learning the skill of resilience in the academic realm, this course in Computational Humanities has challenged Alexis in new ways. In regards to our research, Alexis was excited to combine gender studies and Greek poetry, two topics she has focused on in the past.
Cherina is a sophomore, double majoring in Biological Science and History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. She joined this class to fulfill an honors credit, and because she is interested in the humanities. Because this course applies computational methods to the humanities she knew she would be able to apply the technical skills and knowledge gained in this course to future projects. Cherina found our research to be a great opportunity to analyze how pain relates to gender through one of her interests in humanities, which is literary analysis and interpretation.
Richa, a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh, is a double major in Computational Biology and Anthropology, while also pursuing a certificate in Global Health. She joined this class because she saw it as a unique opportunity to bring together seemingly distinct disciplines. While she has a background in CS, she has learned many new technologies in this course. Pertaining to our research, Richa has a distinct interest in perception and the embodiment of pain.
Vidya is a sophmore at the University of Pittsburgh, double majoring in English and Anthropology. Vidya is also minoring in Chemistry. She joined this class to learn how to use different computer tools and languages to conduct research in the humanities. Vidya's favorite Greek tragedy is Medea, which was one of our main inspirations for our research topic.
Caroline Gish, a TA who helped guide us through every aspect of our project, is a senior at the University of Pittsburgh. She is double majoring in Linguistics and English Literature, with a Korean minor. She plans on continuing her linguistics education at Georgetown University in their Computational Linguistics MS program. Caroline became a TA for this course because she finds it fulfilling to help students through the learning process and to show them that anyone can code, all while strengthening her own knowledge of the technologies.
Charlie, a TA who also helped guide us though our project, is a junior at the University of Pittsburgh. Charlie is a double major in Art History and Classics with a minor in French. Charlie plans to get her Ph.D. in Art History. She wanted to become a TA for this class because she loves working with students and seeing all of the impressive projects each semester.
We would like to thank our project mentors, Caroline Gish and Charlie Taylor, and our professor, Dr. David Birnbaum. They were essential to the completion of this project!
We would also like to acknowledge and thank Gregory Crane from The University of Tufts Department of Classical Studies and Lisa Cerrano from Perseus Digital Library for providing a full text XML document for Medea.