For my final project I created a series of Jupiter notebooks which can analyze and interact with marked up plays to provide tools for directors, actors, dramaturges and playwrights.  These applications explore the wide array of easy to automate tasks in theater using a unified Play Markup Language (PML) designed for this project.  The notebooks can create visualizations of elements of the play, assist dramaturges in analysis of the play, and assist actors who are memorizing their lines.  These notebooks only scratch the surface of what is possible, but will serve to demonstrate the possibilities to working professionals in the field so that they can express what their further needs might be that the system could automate.

Although Jupyter notebooks are traditionally used to inter splice code and text in an explanation, for many of these applications non-technical users would not be able to interface with them in an interspersed state.  Instead, an interfile referential structure by which much of the code can be offloaded to hidden python files was created, essentially allowing the jupyter notebook to serve as an easy to build web application that has all of the power of python and its libraries built in.

The first batch of notebooks is now available online via binder, and additional notebooks will continue to be added over the next several months:

https://mybinder.org/repo/kevinmkarol/playtools

(Occasionally the generic link can’t be loaded – the specific link for this version is https://app.mybinder.org:80/2847712427/tree)