Entry 3 – B. Gincley on O. Scott

Looking at Oliver’s Project 1 document, and starting with the problem statement, it is interesting that the statement, and largely the document itself, is centered more around the problem and less around the discipline, a contrast to my approach. To note, Oliver did not explicitly mention his discipline in the problem statement itself, but rather colored the story of the problem. Extracting from his annotations, it appears that his selected discipline is electrical and computer engineering (or related), though nowhere is this made glaringly specific. This more subtle approach is an interesting contrast to mine.

When looking at the structure of citations, it appears that Oliver had made the citations based off of the schema we had determined, as evidenced by the forward-reading author names and flow/structure of the citations themselves of [taggable materials] [everything else, if available]. In contrast, I had taken the direct citation from the sources themselves (either from the publication source or scientific publication indexing/citing software), pasted it into XML, and then worked around it to put each item into tags. This difference in approaches is interesting, and likely came from a minimum-required-effort perspective: for me, long citations were available already formatted, and it was easier to fit tags around them than match the precision of the citation style typing on my own; for him, sources seemed to have come mainly from the web, and therefore citations would have to be constructed manually anyway.

As for the annotations, Oliver seems to have made an effort to include every tag whenever possible, whereas I had omitted some tags and largely kept to a 4-element annotation, while he maintained a 6-element pattern. Both of us appeared to have decided on which element was being used first, wrote the text for that element, closed it, and then began the next element. Neither of us had text that existed outside of elements. While my elements usually contained two sentences each, Oliver seems to have held a pretty strict 1-sentence-per-element regime, another interesting interpretation of the schema structure.

After viewing his structure, I would consider taking a closer look at my tagging to see if I could have broken some elements into two smaller ones, as Oliver had done.