¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 This past week were able to break out from the classroom, slightly, when we spoke with Kate Singer from Mount Holyoke. Kate will serve as an advisor to end/line, and her comments, questions, and suggestions on Wednesday granted us some new perspectives on our work thus far. After we introduced ourselves, discussed our roles, and gave brief overviews of the technology used and the scholarly outreach campaign in progress, we delved into what the project needs to clarify and what it might become. Because Professor Singer has used TEI to teach poetry and poetics before, she understands the technical landscape and posed a series of questions:

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• Do you envision students using Oxygen, an XML editor, to encode poetry before uploading? Our answer: maybe, but we’d prefer they encode directly on the site.
• Does end/line validate user-submitted XML, and, if that XML is invalid, does it point out the error(s)? Our answer: yes and yes, thanks to Brian’s work.
• Do you have plans to distinguish XML tags with color for better readability? Our answer: perhaps, but that’s most likely out-of-scope at the moment.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Her knowledge of the digital humanities, and their intersections with literary studies, was also helpful. In fact, she encouraged us not only to reach out to digital humanities and digitally-inclined poetry and poetics instructors but also to consider that there may be a whole community of literature professors, with little-to-no knowledge of TEI, that might be interested in our work. Finally, Professor Singer challenged us to think about how end/line might mine submitted encodings to uncover the most commonly used tags, the tags most commonly associated with errors, and other such data (this work would, of course, be something to consider after the semester concludes).

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 After this conversation, we then discussed our current state of affairs with Professor Rhody, who suggested that we might want to write a proposal for the next round of NEH Digital Advancement Grants. Like our conversation with Professor Singer, this suggestion allowed us to break out of the classroom and consider end/line from a new, and wider, perspective. In fact, we reached a quick consensus and decided that it would be worthwhile to put together a proposal.