Week 4 – Generative Text; Shakespeare

Week 4 – Generative Text

CONCEPT:

I recently re-read one of my favorite Shakespearean plays, The Merchant of Venice. When it came time to start my assignment, I knew I wanted to create something related to Shakespeare. I began by searching for “Shakespeare datasets” online and clicked on the first link I found on Kraggle.  The vast amount of data available was overwhelming, and I realized I could approach the project in many ways. After experimenting with different methods for generating text, I ultimately decided to focus on extracting character lines. A user selects a play, a character from that specific play, and then a line at random is generated.

CODING:

I did find this assignment challenging, as working with APIs is something I am not familiar with. Funnily enough, I spent time focusing over a silly mistake, wondering why my code was not working – it was because I had forgotten to upload the actual file into p5.js. 

I was unsure on how to get started, therefore I took to p5.js – Table for aid. From there, I learnt how to upload my data.However, I faced several issues in terms of uploading the file because it was colossally over the file size limit, so I had to spend a lot of time cutting 3 to 4 plays out of the file in order for it to be of a decent file size.

However, during my coding, I came across an issue. The character lists were not showing up on my dropdown list. After several attempts of testing and Youtube videos, I took to ChatGPT to give me help. It then told me although I was populating the ‘play’ dropdown in the setup() function,  I wasn’t updating the character dropdown when a play is selected. To fix this, I needed to add an event listener to the playSelect dropdown that will update the characterSelect dropdown whenever a new play is chosen. I asked it to explain the logic of the task at hand and I was finally able to understand. I created a new function called updatecharacterselect() — which basically  dynamically updates the character dropdown menu.

function generateRandomLine() {
  selectedCharacter = characterSelect.value();
  if (selectedPlayName && selectedCharacter && characterDialogues[selectedPlayName][selectedCharacter]) {
    let lines = characterDialogues[selectedPlayName][selectedCharacter];
    randomLine = random(lines);
  }
}

REFLECTION.

Perhaps, if I were able to expand on this, then I would add further levels of interactivity and make it a bit more aesthetically pleasing.