I chose my Omeka project to revise for the final because I had a clear vision for taking it further, and the work plan was something I felt I could manage within the parameters of the online platform. (Although the creative focus of my Twine project really appealed to my poet’s sensibilities, I felt that it would probably take me the whole week just to come up with a realistic work plan to accomplish what I wanted. 🙂 )  My purpose in constructing the initial site, “Poetry by Women Before the Twentieth Century”, was to create a space for the comparative analysis of a body of premodern poems by women.  My initial site contained the text images of six poems, as well as portraits of their authors.  These items were organized into one, general exhibit.  In revising, my primary focus was content and display.  To expand the content, I added six new items: 3 new poems, and their accompanying author portraits.  I also created three collections to organize all the text images according to centuries.  However, I found that the exhibits were a more user-friendly way to both organize and display items, so I didn’t make any other collections.  It’s possible that the collection option will become more useful as I build a larger catalog of items. Because the poems already on the site were by English and American writers, I wanted to branch out geographically.  One thing I discovered was that it was difficult to track down early or original texts of premodern poems by non-western women writers.  For example, I really wanted to include Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, but I couldn’t find any early text images of any of her poetry.  One thing I’ll consider if I expand this project further is tracking down and scanning hard-copy texts so that I can feature a wider variety of authors.  Additionally, although some trends are cropping up within the current body of authors, more content will be needed to accurately represent poems by women writers during this time period.  That being said, I was able to incorporate writers from two additional countries, Ireland and Vietnam.   Once I’d added new content to the site, my next task was organizing the content in ways that would allow readers to make connections and observe differences.  Because I created a catalog of tags as I revised my items list, I also carried the tagging over into the organizational process.  I created five different exhibits within two categories.  The first category is time frame, and includes three exhibits named by century, allowing poems to be classified by date of production.  This may encourage site users to look for similarities within a single century, or to consider the relationships between poems from different time frames.  The second category is geographical location.  Because so many of the poems included were produced by writers from Europe, this category includes one exhibit of European writers, and one exhibit of non-European writers.  My intent is for this categorization to encourage users to explore this breakdown further.  Of course, the number of poems in each category will change as more poets are added to the site.  However, it may be worthwhile to consider how things like social development and global power structures play a role not only in who was writing during this time period, but also in which of these poems are most pervasive today.  That just about summarize my revision process, so here’s the new site:  Post-Sappho and Pre-Plath: Postmodern Poems by Women 

For analysis, I chose the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at NYU.  If you’d like to take a look at the website, you can find it here.  The organization’s mission seems to be to promote a broad and in-depth understanding of ancient cultures.  They do this by encouraging scholarship, compiling and providing useful resources, and making their findings accessible for free on their website.  Resources on the site include (but are not limited to) the following: 1.) an archive of past exhibits that includes video previews, virtual tours and annotated photographs of individual artifacts, 2.) Online access to the ISAW library collections, 3.) Online version of ISAW research journals, 4.) ISAW Papers, an open-content, reviewed journal.

In terms of considering what makes this a good digital humanities project, I’m drawn to the idea of accessibility, as discussed in the Drucker text.  It seems that one digital humanities goal is to free knowledge from the exclusive clutches of the elite in favor of allowing a larger portion of the population to have access and the opportunity to become more participatory.  ISAW’s website promotes this in a number of ways.  For one thing, allows people who might be unable to travel to exhibit locations to experience as fully as website technology will allow.  For another, it provides online access to scholarly publications without requiring a membership or university affiliation.  Finally, ISAW Papers encourages relevant scholarly contributions from all, which might encourage more independent scholars to participate in related projects.  While these are certainly not the only ways in which the ISAW site promotes the idea of accessible knowledge, they serve as strong examples of how this project embodies one digital humanities objective. 🙂

I feel like both digi-lit pieces brought, at least for me, their own unique sets of challenges and rewards.  Because I ready My Body first, that’s where I’ll start with my analysis and observation.  I do like the hyperlink navigation style.  While it allowed for autonomous progression through the storyline, it provided enough structure and direction to maintain a continuous experience of the “text.”  (This was not my experience with Galatea, but more on that later.)  This kind of continuity, even though it wasn’t necessarily linear, appealed me.  I’m still working on articulating why, specifically, I feel this way.  It might be due to the fact that it’s an approach that somewhat mirrors the continuity of reading a hard copy text for an extended period time.  One of the things that also seemed particularly well-suited to the hypertext navigation was the stream of consciousness feel of the narrative.  Perhaps it seems less like stream of consciousness if you navigate through the pieces in different orders, but the path I chose felt very “Proust-ish.”  The media and methods used to enact this narrative seemed to almost emphasize this aspect.  Thumbs up!

On the other hand, while I was impressed and intrigued by Galatea, I found the navigational experience incredibly frustrating.  As I slowly progressed through the narrative, I wondered if the “trial and error” methods required to move forward were a deliberate part of the author’s design.  On the other hand, it’s possible that there are simply too many possible commands to practically list.  Of course, if the mystery IS deliberate, that raises the question of purpose.  What does the author accomplish by having us hunt and peck for ways to interact with the text?  Is the process designed to make us analyze more thoroughly the material that we do have access to?  Personally, I found the trial and error a bit tedious, but it’s also possible that I might be more open to the format if I were exploring this piece under different circumstances (as opposed to during a five-day intensive seminar 🙂 )

Either way, I think both pieces worked well to illustrate the approaches described in the theoretical text, which I found very helpful.  Having concrete examples when dealing with technology always enhances my understanding.

I feel like there are a number of ways in which the Digital Humanities could impact my research and creative writing.  However, for the sake of brevity (and sanity), I’ll focus on one.  Because I both study and write poetry, I’m particularly interested in how the interactive elements of digital literature formats could be applied to this area.  One idea I had was the possibility of creating a “Found Poem Workbook” that would allow readers/users to produce their own poetry from pieces of someone else’s work.  For example, one “page” might contain all the words from a William Carlos Williams poem, arranged in order of frequency.  The reader/user would then be able to drag and drop the words to create their own poem.  It might also be interesting to color-code each word so that each new poem created by a reader/user has a different and prominent visual “signature.”  I think this might be an interesting way to create interactive poetry anthologies, too.