Poetry Ribbons – an app intended to augment the experience of reading poetry. Poetry Ribbons aims to encourage end users to discover more meanings in poetry not written in the user’s native language.

This project was my senior capstone for my bachelor’s degree in Emerging Media and Communication (a media studies degree with applied work in interaction design and user experience) at The University of Texas at Dallas.

View the website: >> poetryribbons.cathrynploehn.com.

Deliverables (described below):

Inspiration

I know that when I meet my own life in a great poem, I feel opened, clarified, confirmed somehow in what I sensed was true but had no words for. Anything that can do this is surely necessary for the fullness of a human life. -Roger Housden, author

Upon engaging with a brilliantly written poem, we feel a sense of fulfillment. We become closer to the author’s mind and point of view. We connect to ideas delivered by carefully written prose that widen our perspectives and even help us learn a little about ourselves. We reach a sense of self-actualization more readily by reading poetry in our native language.

What if a similar sense of fulfillment could be gleaned from translated poetry?

Overview

“All acts of communication are acts of translation” (The Center for Translation Studies, 2014). Words, or signifiers, are only a representation their signified meanings. Translation through language adds another layer to the equation. Translators must interpret the underlying meanings of different words, reconstructing ideas from one language to another. Translations are a bridge from one idea to another, closing gaps in language and culture.

In translating poetry, valuable meaning is lost in the act of translating poetry from one language to another. For example, nearly every word used in a poem has alternative words that could have been used. In addition, changes in syntax or poem structure potentially cause differences in translated works.

How can we more effectively represent translated poems?

Poetry Ribbons is an app intended to augment the experience of reading poetry. Poetry Ribbons aims to encourage end users to discover more meanings in poetry not written in the user’s native language. Poetry, like any other artifact, can be translated in a variety of ways to evoke meaning. Different modalities of perception can be leveraged to translate poetry. Alternative avenues of communication, such as sound and images, provide viable tools to elicit meaning from a poem. Like ribbons, poetry has a flowing and fluid quality, especially when read aloud. Verbal narratives involve a temporal element.

Poems also portray different feelings (textures), emotions (colors), and mood (contexts).Exploring this metaphor, Poetry Ribbons will be a system that translates poetry as it is read, line by line, through alternative modalities. The system will promote the exploration of poetic meaning in varying languages and methods. This project was supervised by Cassini Nazir and was completed in partnership with the Center for Translation Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas. Specifically, Dr. Rainer Schulte and Dr. Frank Dufor were the consulting members. Michelle Rosen also contributed to the initial stages of the project’s conception.

The current iteration of Poetry Ribbons can be found at poetryribbons.com.

Target Audience

The target audience of Poetry Ribbons is college students with an interest in poetry. In particular, according to my research, students find inherent value in exposure to the new perspectives provided by poetry in other languages. However, many members of the same target group also do not actually seek to read poetry in multiple translations. Students fail to seek multilingual poetry because of perceived and actual barriers to accessing poetic content in different languages. Goals and Measures of Success Due to the constraints of development time, budget, and development experience, the scope of the initial iteration of Poetry Ribbons was kept small. End goals of the project include

Development of a system that provides a multi-modal translation of poetry
Provide an engaging experience that heightens understanding of poetic material
Bolster student understanding of works

Measures of success of the system include

Visualization of poem text
Easy to use method of reading through translation(s) of a poem
Positive user feedback and criticism

The project specifications involved many constraints, including

Copyrights: Which works are appropriate to use? Will rights have to be obtained for full implementation of Poetry Ribbons?
Scalability: How well will the Poetry Ribbons paradigm scale to include a large variety of poetic works?
Acquiring library of words, translations: Where will the content for poetry be obtained? How will this work be found?
Acquiring poem readings, formatting sound: Will there be sufficient poetry narrated by an original author in a non-English language? Will this content need to be translated? Will the sound be available in the appropriate format?
Streamlining visualization and sonification methods: What technology should be used to best visualize and sonify poetry?

Context

Competition

Many apps for poetry reading exist on the marketplace currently. For example, Poem Viewer involves a visualization of English poetry (British and American), breaking down verses into phonetic alphabet, phonetic type, phonetic feature, phonetic relations, word units, semantic relations, vowel length, stress, and syllable breaks (Poem Viewer, 2013). Poem Viewer also allows viewer-generated content. Poem Viewer focuses on a cryptic system of poem dissection. Learning the language of the visualization provides a formidable learning curve. Also, the idea is more suited for the academic mindset.

Poetry Foundation released an application that randomly selects poetry to read from a large database (Poetry Foundation, 2014). The app is designed for mobile platforms. A user finds a poem to read by initiating a “spin” interaction, which visually selects a poem to for a user to read. The Poetry Foundation app is very easy to use. However, poem text is static and the reading interface does not provide added value.

The Poetry App involves narration, text, and visuals. 100 poems are utilized from 16 of the “greatest poets of all time” (The Poetry App, 2013). The interface employs a skeumorphic style. The app allows users to watch and listen to many popular poems in English. The app also allows users to write and record their own poems.

Another app, Poetry Daily, grants users a new poem every day from “new books, magazines, and journals” (Petronzio, 2012). However, poetry translation is not a popular topic in the application development world. Few poems focus on the semantic problem of poetry and translation. Furthermore, few apps focus on the convergence of poetry translation and reading poetry for recreation. Developers who do take a deeper look at poetry approach the topic poetry through an academic lens.

In contrast to most of the apps in the marketplace, Poetry Ribbons aims to address the tough question of what type of role translation plays in the experience of poetry and augmenting this experience through multiple modes of interaction. However, because of the focus on semantic and literary topics, teachers may utilize Poetry Ribbons as a teaching tool. The app could serve as a gateway to exposure to poetry. Also, the framework could be extended to analyze music lyrics in different languages, much like the tool RapGenuis.com.

Audience

In order to understand the goals and habits of the target audience, north Texas college students interested in poetry, I conducted a good measure of user research (described below). I gathered data on both the habits and values of the target audience. The most fascinating aspect of student habits regarding Poetry Ribbons was the different in student values and habits. Because of the dissonance between the values and habits college students have in regards to translated poetry, an opportunity exists to bridge the gap between students and poetry in other languages. One of the most important aspects of students as an audience is the context in which they enjoy poetry. Many students engage with the medium in recreational manner. Additionally, students read poetry at a particular time of the day and a specific time of the week. Students value the perspective, connection, and meaning they can glean from poetry.

As opposed to other potential audiences, such as academics, a focus on the poem in a context of relaxation and entertainment is vital.

Craft

User research determined the best format for Poetry Ribbons was a web app. Poetry Ribbons is currently built on modern web technologies, including

HTML
CSS/SASS/Bourbon
JavaScript/jQuery
Web Audio API

Approach

My design process involved six major phases 1. Gather background knowledge, refine project plan 2. Research users-gather data about end user practices and goals 3. Derive project requirements-Construct user mental models 4. Design of interactions and GUIs 5. High fidelity prototype development 6. Quality assurancegather larger amounts of user feedback The design process lasted a full 16 weeks:

Gather Background Knowledge

Tools Used:

• iPad, Andriod tablets

• Designing with the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson

Deliverable: communication brief (PDF)

Research Users

Tools Used:

Paper surveys
User archetypes
Empathy map

Deliverable: research brief (PDF)

Description: I conducted surveys in two types of locations: poetry readings and poetry classes. Two surveys I administered covered both questions addressing the poetry reading habits of individuals and the values students have in regards to poetry. The following student habits we synthesized from 50 user responses

What? Popular poets Byron, Frost, Shel Silverstein, Edgar Allan Poe
Where? Home, isolated spaces
When? Night, sometimes afternoon
Why? To relax, to be stimulated emotionally
How? Books and computer dominantly, tablet secondarily

Branching from a combination of the overarching habits and values of poetry-reading college students, I could synthesize two major student archetypes (instead of personas, which I find restrictive). As mentioned beforehand, the difference between the value students find in translated poetry versus whether they actually read translated poetry is interesting: What is the value of translated poetry?

“Gaining the beauty and meaning behind another individual’s work. Sometimes the most beautify and significant poems to us is written in another language and we’ll never realize that poem because we can’t understand that other language. People tend to read what’s convenient and easily accessible.”

Why do you not read translated poetry?

“I’ve never sought out to expose myself to poetry in another language, or I haven’t known that some of the poems were translated to begin with.”

Project Requirements

Tools used

Empathy map
Guiding principles
Experience Goals
Key design strategies

Deliverable: Requirements specifications, experience brief (PDF)

Description: An experience brief was constructed based on the research brief and communication brief. Guiding principles, experience goals, and key design strategies were mapped out. Visualization questions and risks were mapped out.

Interaction and GUI Design

Tools used:

Pen and paper
Whiteboard
sticky notes
User journeys
Concept map

Deliverable: Design document (wireframes, user journeys) (PDF)

Description: The organizing principles and requirements were used as a basis for starting user journeys, which were critiqued and co-written with more members of the target audience. A heuristic approach was then used to create low fidelity interface designs, including the 10 + 10 technique (adapted into a 5 + 5 technique) from Leah Buley’s The User Experience Team of One. These sketches were refined into pen and paper wireframes.

New requirements synthesized from user feedback

The structure of the stanza at large is important.
Rereading lines of the poem, speed of delivery, is vital for immersion.
The first experience will set the overall attitude for the app.
Giving the reader options to control which modalities to include in their experience is important.
Sharing of the visual – aggregation of the entire poem, not simply a temporal experience – after reading a poem

High Fidelity Prototype Development

Tools used

Prepros – javaScript and SASS precompiler
Netbeans – Integrated Development Environment
Sublime – code editor
gModeler – UML Class design, online documentation
Gliffy – UML Sequence design

Deliverable: Web-hosted implementation: poetryribbons.cathrynploehn.com

Description: An increment and iterative methodology was used to develop the web site. First, an initial set of JavaScript classes were created. Then, a rudimentary framework, or stub code, was created. Class diagrams were refined and sequence diagrams created.

Major Decisions

Choosing an audience of students was not the initial direction the suggested project was going to take. In my initial meetings with members from The Center for Translation Studies, an audience of translators seemed to be the primary focus. However, selecting an audience of students provided me with an opportunity to increase interest in poetry to population not typically conceived as the “poetry type.”

I decided a multimodal/entertainment approach was also necessary for this project. While the translation introduces noise to a poem and different translations could be decomposed into the decisions made by the translator. An analytical route could easily be taken to understand the intricacies of poetry translation.

Instead, bridging the gap in experience between the poet who writes in non-English languages and the English-speaking student became the primary focus. Creating a fuller experience was a greater focus rather than creating a fuller understanding of the translations. How can we bring students closer to the poem and the different ways it can come to mean?

What I Learned

Working on Poetry Ribbons provided an opportunity to apply many concepts learned through reading User Experience literature. In particular, conducting actual ethnographic-style researched proved to be an invaluable experience. I have never fully implemented a project from the design phase to high fidelity prototype in a self-guided manner. I began to understand the techniques and best practices for this type of development.

The hands on experience gave an chance to understand the development process. For example, I had never designed software classes for a larger system before. I successfully implemented a cohesive project only because of my background in software engineering and the skills I gained from taking these types of courses. Some new hard skills I learned included the basics behind Web Audio API and a more in-depth understanding of how to develop classes in JavaScript.

My one regret is not soliciting the help of more emerging media and communications students and software engineering students to join my team. Time and expertise formed the main bottlenecks for development, and more hands on deck would have allowed me to broaden the scope of the project.

Impact

A survey with an implementation of the minimally viable product was distributed to poetry-reading students. XX number of students took the survey. Most responses were positive, with feedback including statements such as:

“It’s interesting and it give me a new way to look at poetry. It’s useful in terms reading poetry but it would need more poetry to be a substantial experience.”

Documented responses:

How often do you read poetry translated from another language?

Students who took the survey tended to read poetry translated into other languages more than initial user research

Was showing the original poem and the translated poem side by side useful?

Students indicated the presentation of the translated and original poem was useful.

How useful was the visual on the right hand side?

“not useful exactly, but nice to see.” “It was my main focus. I was listening to the poem audio and looking at the visual for the most part.”

“It was helpful to understand the modulations, especially if I were to recite the poem myself.”

“Very”

“Very useful!”

“i mean it was less boring that looking at the text but id ont know what use it had”

“It is engaging. In that way, it is quite useful.”

How attractive is the interface design?

“It’s very clean and the navigation is easy. I do think it could use more color.”

“It is easy to read, crisp, but scrolling might be a challenge at times, if I am reading faster than the recitation.”

“Very”

“Fairly attractive.”

“it looks great. i wish there was somewhere that said more about the poet with his picture and interesting life facts so i could be more intrigued. also, perhaps by clickking on each line of text i could see an explanation of what it meant”

“Clean, intuitive — with a focus on the prose. Elegant.”

Explain any difficulties you had using the interface.

The poem was purposely set up to stop scrolling midway through in order to see low long users interacted with the poem.

“the only thing i noticed is that the translation voice was not synced exactly with the line being highlighted blue. It was a little difficult to focus on all three components at once.”

“Scrolling was weird.”

“Was hard to notice that I could scroll down on the poem”

“The highlighted lines stopped in the middle of the poem and the scroll bar didn’t follow it as the poem was read. after the first page wage done, the guy kept on reading the poems but the page didnt flip by itself and the blue highlighting on the text stopped. I also wish i could choose betwen listening to him in english or in spanish. the way he read the poem in spanish was very harsh and I didn’t like his voice.”

“None”.

What is your overall evaluation of the website? (Is it useful, not useful, etc)

“AWESOME! :3”

“It’s interesting and it give me a new way to look at poetry. It’s useful in terms reading poetry but it would need more poetry to be a substantial experience.”

“It is useful! I wish we could have all poems by all non-English poets on the website!”

“Useful” “Very useful! I enjoy it very much.”

“its good!”

“Useful. Educational. Rad.”

Overall, student response was positive. Most respondents found the interface easy to use and enjoyed the multimodal approach. As predicted, some users did not find the visual helpful, which was the rationale behind giving users the ability to hide the visual component. However, some flaws still exist in the interface, including confusion surrounding the scrollbar. Also, the capability to add more poetry to the interface would increase the viability of the system. Other features, such as multiple translations, would greatly improve the entire experience.

Conclusion

The development of a proof of concept implementation of Poetry Ribbons was a very rewarding experience. The project required multiple skillsets, many of which I picked up in my studies in software engineering, new media literature, and user experience design. Working through a project from idea generation through to execution provides valuable experience in the project development journey.

Constraints on the project held back Poetry Ribbons from the success it could have had this semester. In particular, the time constraint of 16 weeks of project development coupled with the development team size hurt the prospects of Poetry Ribbons.

Works Cited

Poem Viewer. (2013). Retrieved April 16, 2014, from Poem Viewer: http://ovii.oerc.ox.ac.uk/PoemVis/ The Poetry App. (2013). Retrieved April 16, 2014, from Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mcsaatchimobile.thepoetryapp

Petronzio, M. (2012, April 8). 7 Mobile Apps for Discovering and Creating Poetry. Retrieved April 16, 2014, from mashable.com: http://mashable.com/2012/04/08/poetry-apps/#_

Poetry Foundation. (2014). Poetry Mobile App for iPhone and Android. Retrieved April 16, 2014, from Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/mobile/

The Center for Translation Studies. (2014). Manifesto for Translation Studies. Retrieved April 27, 2014, from The Center for Translation Studies: http://translation.utdallas.edu/translation_studies/manifesto.html