¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Two events this past week proved elucidating, and both have helped me gain newer, much needed perspectives on the project. First, during Wednesday’s class, Jojo and Lisa provided good critiques of the current iteration of the app. Jojo encouraged me, and our group, to develop more of a pedagogical frame that allows both new and experienced TEI users to understand the connections between close reading and encoding. Most importantly, however, she emphasized that developing this pedagogical frame doesn’t, necessarily, require more sophisticated features (like an analysis tool that breaks down, tag-by-tag, a user’s encoding). Instead, simple prompts and sidebars that reiterate how TEI markup can help us slow down and consider the structures and semantics at work in poetry can prove helpful. Lisa, meanwhile, encouraged us to rethink the ways in which we guide users through the site. More specifically, she challenged us to draw more of a connection between poetry and TEI in the tagline and deck on the homepage, clarify our public domain and intellectual property policies, and perhaps publish a “How It Works” flowchart or infographic. All of these suggestions anticipated the second elucidating event of the week: beta testing responses. Five literature scholars at Ryerson University in Toronto spent this past Thursday morning (the #dayofdh on Twitter) using the site, and they emphasized the need to clarify its purpose and guides its users in a more considered way (see our group post and Iuri’s reflection for more on this subject).

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 All of this has added new work to our to-do list but, on a larger level, it has forced me to define the project more concretely. I’ve reread my proposal to recapture some of the original thinking that drove the project, and I hope to align it more closely with what we’ve put together thus far. And I also realize that some of that original thinking was overly vague and requires some editing. I’m confident that we can hone the messaging and foreground the site as place for students and teachers to slow down and use TEI to read poetry more closely, understanding the hierarchies and rhetorical tropes of texts through the act of encoding. If I can articulate that by 17 May, then I think the project will be stronger and more worthy of the massive amounts of good work that the community management and development teams have already contributed.