Exploring Poetry
The purpose of our project was to design, test, and evaluate several distinct software
programs, each on an individual poem. Each program would allow students in introductory
literature and poetry courses to explore the poem in depth and develop an interpretation of it.
With the help of a group of faculty, with whom we consulted throughout the project, we chose
the poems to be used, and in the first year of the grant tested preliminary and revised versions of
the first program, on Robert Frost’s “Design,” and completed the preliminary version of a second
one, on W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts.” In the second year, we presented our work at
three conferences, tested and revised “Musee des Beaux Arts” extensively, continued planning
and began the programming for two more programs (one on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The
Windhover,” and one on elementary prosody, called “Poetry to the Ear”) and hosted a conference
on “Computers and the Humanities” at our college. Students at a community college and a senior
college used the programs during the two years of the grant in a total of eighteen poetry or
introductory literature courses, and several other classes served as control groups. Many
suggestions made by these students and teachers were implemented in later versions of the
programs, as well as those of an outside evaluator on educational software design.
Purpose
The problem our project addressed was the difficulty that students in introductory
literature classes often have with close reading of poetry, and their reluctance to do so. Our goal
was to emphasize close reading and analysis. During the course of the grant, our understanding
of the problem itself did not fundamentally change. In fact, the ways the students used the
programs made us aware of reading difficulties we had not anticipated. The records of each use
of the programs indicate how students go about reading and analyzing; this taught us more about
their learning processes than we could have discovered through traditional classroom instruction
(see “Evaluation” below for a description of these records.) The greatest problem many of them
have, we found, was in putting together the pieces of information they had learned into a coherent
overall interpretation. According to the data we collected, the programs were for the most part
successful in focusing attention on the language of the poems and allowing students to do very
detailed close reading. The specific questions they were asked to answer encouraged this, and the
nature of the computer itself commands concentration. Certainly most students enjoyed using the
programs. They particularly liked the ease with which they could access information about
individual words and concepts. They could work at their own speed, and this varied greatly from
student to student.
Any administrative pitfalls involved in using our software would have to do with providing
the requisite technology to support it. Technology is developing and changing at such a rapid
pace that both the software designer and the campus must constantly be prepared to adjust. The
college must be responsible for keeping hardware up to date, an expensive proposition in days of
tightened budgets. College technicians must be on hand for the multitudinous things that can go
wrong with the equipment. Teachers (especially those who are unaccustomed to using computers
with their classes) need some instruction in using the software, though the programs are really
self-explanatory and “computer literacy” is not required.
Those who embark on software development themselves will learn, as we did, that
everything takes longer than expected; equipment breaks down, unforeseen bugs occur, viruses
appear. Constant adjustments have to be made as one perceives how the programs are actually
used. For example, we discovered that each poem requires an entirely different approach and that
we could not simply copy the procedures we had already worked out. New developments in
technology allow for more and more sophisticated design and more and more possibilities, but
with each new invention adjustments in the plans have to be made. These are exciting times for
software development, but the speed of change in the field requires that expectations must
undergo constant revision.
An exciting outcome of our project was the unanticipated development of a method of
programming complex relationships through the input of faculty participants. Originally, we
ourselves determined the possible interpretations of a poem and decided how the students’
understanding of individual parts of the poem might fit into those interpretations. We found that
the program based on our judgments was to some extent faulty, chiefly in the appropriateness of
some of the comments the program made on the students’ answers. When we met with our
faculty participants, we realized that they brought to the poem in question a wider range of
understanding than we had originally conceived. We assigned them the task of developing a list
of possible interpretations of the poem as a whole. They discussed the lists submitted by each of
them at the meetings we held regularly, and, under Dr. Camp’s guidance, they ultimately reached a
consensus. We then designed a grid which the group would use to indicate what readings of parts
of the poem were to be judged consistent or inconsistent with the various interpretations.
After we administered the preliminary version of the program to the classes using it, we
asked the group to categorize the answers that students gave to specific questions, each expressed
by the students in their own way. Once the categories were formulated, we distributed the grid to
the participating faculty. On it, each teacher was to indicate the relationship between a category
of answer and the interpretations agreed on earlier. Once the grids were completed, discussed by
the group at large, and merged. Dr. Nimchinsky was able to use the resulting master grid to create
the database of responses and to modify the programming design. This method made it possible
for the program to respond to the answers which the students give in their own words and to
judge the internal consistency of their replies.
What we have described may seem a well thought out and organized approach to creating
a program dealing with text, and that is indeed what it turned out to be. In its development,
however, it evolved in stages that we at first did not notice or appreciate. Eventually, it became
clear that we had hit upon an extremely effective methodology for dealing with textual analysis
and interpretation. Moreover, we learned from this process that there are no short-cuts to
developing this type of software, that neither the programmer’s or the scholar’s ivory tower
provides a good vantage point for dealing with the reactions of others— especially students. We
feel at this point that, in the future, we can 1) teach our approach to other teachers and
programmers, and 2) extend this methodology to other fields in which the interpretation of texts is
crucial. In the meantime, we are eager to apply our method to other poetic works.