Speak Lightning

For those interested, here's a bit about the project--bare-bones idea, shanked from my IRB proposal:

The goal of this study is to use XML markup technologies, through the English Department's project, for the teaching and reading of poetry. Students come to the university with a decided aversion to poetry, often too far removed from the literature to gain any sense of its usefulness. This exploratory study questions what we can learn about the way students read poetry and the ways in which they identify various poetic features.

The study's importance derives from its approach to poetry pedagogy. While the application of computing technology to the teaching of writing seemed a natural fit for professors in the academy, the application to reading has been less enthusiastically grasped. Most computer "readings" of texts utilize hypertext linking to include external sources. Few seek to apply the technology as a reading environment that also sees the necessary connection between reading and writing. This project takes as a foundational idea and goal the necessity of those two activities for the understanding and enjoyment of poetic endeavor.

While we've always been able to "write with the writer" by notations in margins, copying, etc., technology allows for a highly customizable reading of the text. Once features are marked up in the particular poem, XSLT processing strategies can offer a variety of readings efficiently, thereby offering the student a number of windows into the poem from which to choose.

Finally, the study will offer introductory/directional data for future work in the application of XML technologies to the teaching of reading. This research is, first and foremost, exploratory in nature. I hope to find trends in frequency of features in commonly marked texts, as well as the instructive ommissions; how many students incorrectly identify a feature or miss markup opportunities, for example. In the XML creation segment, I anticipate further exploration, both the part of the researcher and the subjects, into the constructedness of poetic endeavor. A central question there is "How do students read a poet?" Does the search for the structural underpinnings of a body of work produce viable scholarship?