Progress:
From our original idea for the project, we’ve adapted our project to yield some results that are a bit more conclusive and realistic. Instead of tracking the progression of a variety of Carleton teams over their histories, we’ve decided to focus solely on the Carleton football team. Given the longevity of the football team and its significance as a sport in the college sports realm, we believe that we’ll be able to provide a better in-depth analysis on one team rather than brief analyses on multiple teams. Right now, we’re working on collecting the positions of the team over the century that they’ve competed during, which is quite time-consuming since all the records are just pdfs and can’t just be scrubbed with a tool. Instead, we have to go through each pdf and log each position individually. We’ve also been working on finding events in Carleton’s, the NCAA’s, and the world’s history that could have had effects on the team’s success.
Problems:
As pointed out above, collecting all the data is a slow process, but only focusing on the football team has mitigated that process to a certain extent. In terms of finding events that may have impacted the football team, we will need to set aside some time once we’ve collected data to dive into the Carleton archives (and potentially the NCAA) to find new rules or events that caused the team to do well or badly.
Tools and Techniques:
We plan to use Palladio as a tool to visualize our data through an interactive timeline.
Deliverables:
Although we had a slight hiccup in our project, we believe that our project is still on track and we should be able to have a rough visualization by next week as we’ve originally planned.
2 replies on “Progress Update: Struggling to Gain Yardage”
I understand the pains of having to enter data manually – most institutions are not thinking about how their data are going to be used, but this situation is definitely improving.
I agree with you that this is a much more promising direction than trying to do too much with too little. There are ways of extracting text from PDFs but for the amount you were talking about in the timeline you have, manual might be the best way to go. I would definitely suggest you check out the Carletonian archives for how potential historical events were reported locally, which should give you a better understanding of how they might’ve impacted the football team.