Digital scholarship blog

The New Media Writing Prize (NMWP) is in an annual international award, which encourages and promotes the best in new media writing; showcasing innovative digital fiction, poetry and journalism. The types of interactive writing that we have been examining, researching and tentatively collecting in our emerging formats work at the Library.

Last year we celebrated ten years of the prize, looking back over previous winning entries, with a Digital Conversation event at the British Library. Now we are looking forward to seeing what types of work will be entered into this year's prize.

If you are a writer of interactive works, then you may be interested to know that the 2020 New Media Writing prize is currently open for entries. You can nominate works via the online entry form at https://newmediawritingprize.co.uk/enter/. This year, there is only one category, the if:book UK New Media Writing prize. However, you can enter fiction, poetry, journalism, games, anything as long as it is interactive and makes use of digital media. The deadline is Friday 27th November 2020, 12 noon GMT, or for student entries, these must be entered by Friday 18th December 2020, 12 noon GMT. The organisers are especially encouraging entries from students and will give special consideration to entries from students at undergraduate or postgraduate level. 

There is one award of £1000 for the winner, and there will be commendations for shortlisted works, which the judges feel are deserving of a special mention. All the rules are here, and please do read the FAQs section of the NMWP website, which has more details about what the judges are looking for in entries. If you have a question that is not covered by the FAQ, then you can email the organisers at [email protected]. You may also want to check out the winners and shortlisted entries from the 2019 prize, which I blogged about here, for inspiration. If you do enter, then good luck!

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom). 

For many people, our personal understanding of time has been challenged during the covid-19 pandemic, with minutes, hours and days of the week seeming to all merge together into "blursday", without our previous pre covid-19 routines to help us mark points in time.

Talking of time, the AHRC-funded Chronotopic Cartographies research project has spent the last few years investigating how we might use digital tools to analyse, map, and visualise the spaces, places and time within literary texts. It draws on the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the 'chronotope': a way of describing how time and place are linked and represented in different literary genres.

To showcase research from this project, next Tuesday (29th September 2020) we are co-hosting with them an online interdisciplinary conference: "Mapping Space, Mapping Time, Mapping Texts". 

The "Mapping Space, Mapping Time, Mapping Texts" registration page is here. Once you have signed up, you will receive an email with links to recorded keynotes and webinar sessions. You will also received an email with links to the Flickr wall of virtual research posters and hangout spaces, on the morning of the conference.

The conference will go live from 09.00 BST, all webinars and live Q&A sessions will be held in Microsoft Teams. If you don't have Teams installed, you can do so before the event here. We appreciate that many participants will be joining from different time zones and that attendees may want to dip in and out of sessions; so please join at whatever pace suits you.

Our keynote speakers: James Kneale, Anders Engberg-Pederson and Robert T. Tally Jr have provided recordings of their presentations and will be joining the event for live Q&A sessions over the course of the day. You can watch the keynote recordings at any time, but if you want to have the conference experience, then log in to the webinars at the times below so you can participate "live" across the day. Q&A sessions will be held after each keynote at the times below. 

Schedule:

9.00 BST: Conference goes live, keynotes and posters available online, urls sent via email.

9.30: Short introduction and welcome from Sally Bushell

10.00-11.00: First Keynote: James Kneale

11.00-11.30: Live Q&A (chaired by Rebecca Hutcheon)

2.00-3.00: Second Keynote: Anders Engberg-Pedersen

3.00-3.30: Live Q&A (chaired by Duncan Hay)

5.00-6.00: Third Keynote: Robert T. Tally Jr

6.00-6.30: Live Q&A (chaired by Sally Bushell)

In the breaks between sessions, please do browse the online Flickr wall of research posters and hang out in conference virtual chat room.

We very much look forward to seeing you on-screen, on the day (remember it is Tuesday, not Blursday!).

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom) 

The sixth BL Labs Public Awards 2020 formally recognises outstanding and innovative work that has been carried out using the British Library’s data and / or digital collections by researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators, students and the general public.

The closing date for entering the Public Awards is NOON GMT on Monday 30 November 2020 and you can submit your entry any time up to then.

Please help us spread the word! We want to encourage any one interested to submit over the next few months, who knows, you could even win fame and glory, priceless! We really hope to have another year of fantastic projects to showcase at our annual online awards symposium on the 15 December 2020 (which is open for registration too), inspired by our digital collections and data!

This year, BL Labs is commending work in four key areas that have used or been inspired by our digital collections and data:

• Research - A project or activity that shows the development of new knowledge, research methods, or tools.
• Artistic - An artistic or creative endeavour that inspires, stimulates, amazes and provokes.
• Educational - Quality learning experiences created for learners of any age and ability that use the Library's digital content.
• Community - Work that has been created by an individual or group in a community.

What kind of projects are we looking for this year?

Whilst we are really happy for you to submit your work on any subject that uses our digital collections, in this significant year, we are particularly interested in entries that may have a focus on anti-racist work or projects about lock down / global pandemic. We are also curious and keen to have submissions that have used Jupyter Notebooks to carry out computational work on our digital collections and data.

After the submission deadline has passed, entries will be shortlisted and selected entrants will be notified via email by midnight on Friday 4th December 2020. 

A prize of £150 in British Library online vouchers will be awarded to the winner and £50 in the same format to the runner up in each Awards category at the Symposium. Of course if you enter, it will be at least a chance to showcase your work to a wide audience and in the past this has often resulted in major collaborations.

The talent of the BL Labs Awards winners and runners up over the last five years has led to the production of remarkable and varied collection of innovative projects described in our 'Digital Projects Archive'. In 2019, the Awards commended work in four main categories – Research, Artistic, Community and Educational:

BL  Labs Award Winners for 2019

• Research (2019) Winner: Full-Text search of Early Music Prints Online (F-TEMPO) by Tim Crawford, Goldsmiths, University of London
• Artistic (2019) Winner: Emerging Formats: Discovering and Collecting Contemporary British Interactive Fiction by Lynda Clark
• Community Commendation (2019): John Faucit Saville and the theatres of the East Midlands Circuit - by Lesley Phillips
• Teaching and Learning / Educational (2019) Winner: The Other Voice - RCA - Innovations in sound and art by Masters' students from the Royal College of Art, submitted by Dr Matt Lewis, Tutor of Digital Direction and Dr Eleanor Dare, Reader of Digital Media both at the School of Communication, at the Royal College of Art and Mary Stewart Curator, Oral History and Deputy Director of National Library

For further detailed information, please visit BL Labs Public Awards 2020, or contact us at [email protected] if you have a specific query.

Posted by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of British Library Labs.

This is a guest post by Linda Berube, an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership student based at the British Library and City, University of London. If you would like to know more about Linda's research, please do email her at [email protected].

“There are those who claim that Britain no longer has a comics industry.” (John Freeman, downthetubes.net, quoting Lewis Stringer)

Freeman goes onto say that despite the evidence supporting such a view (have you ever really looked at a WH Smith comics rack? He has: see his photo of one here), the British comics industry is not just all licenced content from the United States, and it has continued to produce new publications. Maybe the newsstand is not necessarily the best place to look for them.
For the newsstand does not tell the whole story. Comics are not all kiddie and superhero characters now, if they ever were (Sabin 1993). Not that there is anything wrong with that content, but prevailing attitudes about the perceived lack of seriousness of these types of comics can inhibit a consideration of comics as cultural objects in their own right, worthy of research. Novelist Susan Hill (2017) expresses a widely held view when she stated: "Is it better for young people to read nothing at all than read graphic novels-which are really only comics for an older age group?". No amount of book awards, academic departments or academic journals have eliminated such sentiments^[1].

The best place for looking at all UK comics have to offer is online. Digital comics have not only brought a whole new audience but new creators, as well as new business models and creative processes. My Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Programme funded research will take a deep dive into these models and processes, from creation to consumption. For this work, I have the considerable support of supervisors Ian Cooke and Stella Wisdom (British Library) and Ernesto Priego and Stephann Makri (Human-Computer Interaction Design Centre, City, University of London)^[2].

Figure 1: Charisma.ai uses innovative technology to create comics

This particular point in time offers an excellent opportunity to consider the digital comics, and specifically UK, landscape. We seem to be past the initial enthusiasm for digital technologies when babies and bathwater were ejected with abandon (see McCloud 2000, for example), and probably still in the middle of a retrenchment, so to speak, of that enthusiasm (see Priego 2011 pp278-280). To date, there have been few attempts at viewing the creation to consumption process of print comics in their entirety, and no complete studies of the production and communication models of digital comics. While Benatti (2019) analysed the changes to the roles of authors, readers, and publishers prompted by the creation of webcomics, she admits that “the uncertain future of the comics print communications circuit makes the establishment of a parallel digital circuit…more necessary than ever for the development of the comics medium”. (p316)

Figure 2: Helen Greetham is part of the international Spider Forest Webcomic collective, one way of distributing and marketing digital comics

Benatti was using the wider publishing industry’s process models and the disruption caused by digital technology as a lens through which to view webcomics. Indeed, historians have discovered cohesive patterns in the development of ideas, especially as embodied in print books. These patterns, most often described as cycles, chains, or circuits, follow the book through various channels of creation, production, and consumption. (See Darnton 1982, diagram of Communication Circuit below, for example). However, they have undergone a significant transformation, disruption even, when considered in the context of the digital environment (Murray and Squires 2013 have update Darnton for the digital and self-publishing age). And at first, it seemed that the disruption would prove terminal for certain types of communication, but most especially books and newspapers in print.

Figure 3: Robert Darnton’s Communication Circuit

What about the production patterns for comics within this publishing context? Have print comics given way to digital comics? And are digital comics the revolution they once seemed?
My research, a scoping study in its first year looking at the UK comics landscape and interviewing comics gatekeepers-mediators (CGMs)^[3], seeks to address the gap in the understanding of the creation to consumption process for digital comics. This first year’s work will be followed up by research into the creative process of digital comics writers and artists and what readers might contribute to that process. It will be the first such research to investigate cohesive patterns and production models through interdisciplinary empirical research for UK digital comics: analysing how an idea and digital comic object is formed, communicated, discussed and transformed by all the participants involved, from authors to CGMs to readers.

References:

Benatti, Francesca (2019). ‘Superhero comics and the digital communications circuit: a case study of Strong Female Protagonist’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics,10 (3), pp306-319. Available at: DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2018.1485720.

Darnton, R. (1982). ‘What Is the History of Books?’ Daedalus,111(3), pp65-83. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/20024803.  Also available at:  https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3403038/darnton_historybooks.pdf

Freeman, John (2020).   ‘British Comics Industry Q&A’, downthetubes.net: exploring comics and more on the web since 1998. Quoting British comics creator and archivist Lew Stringer in a 2015 assessment of news stand comics on his Blimey! It’s Another Blog About Comics blog.  Available at: https://downthetubes.net/?page_id=7110).

Hill, Susan (2017). Jacob’s Room Is Full of Books: A Year of Reading. Profile Books.

McCloud, Scott (2000). Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form.  New York, N.Y: Paradox Press.

Murray, P.R.  and Squires, C. (2013). ‘Digital Publishing Communications Circuit’, Book 2.0, 3(1), pp3-23. Available at: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/btwo.3.1.3_1. See also: Stirling University, Book Unbound https://www.bookunbound.stir.ac.uk/research/.

Priego, Ernesto (2011). The Comic Book in the Age of Digital Reproduction. City, University of London. Journal contribution. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.754575.v4.

Sabin, Roger (1993). Adult comics: An introduction. London: Routledge. See Part 1: Britain 1. The first adult comics 2. Kid's stuff 3.Underground comix  4. 2000AD: 'The Comic of tomorrow!'  5. Fandom and direct sales 6. 'Comics grow up!': dawn of the graphic novel  7.From boom to bust 8.Viz: 'More fun than a jammy bun!'  9. The future.

Footnotes

1. For example, the Pulitzer Prize[Maus]; The Guardian’s First Book Award 2001 [Jimmy Corrigan]; Man Booker Prize longlist [Sabrina], not to mention the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. The fact that graphic novels are singled out from comics here is another entire blog post… ↩︎

2. Ernesto does a nice line in comics himself: see Parables of Care. Creative Responses to Dementia Care, As Told by Carers and I Know How This Ends: Stories of Dementia Care, as well as The Lockdown Chronicles. ↩︎

3. The word ‘publisher’, at least in its traditional sense, just does not seem to apply to the various means of production and distribution. ↩︎

I am an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership student based at the British Library and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL). The studentship is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Programme.

Supervised jointly by Stella Wisdom from the British Library, Roger Sabin and Ian Hague from UAL, my research looks to explore the potential for digital comics to take advantage of digital technologies and the digital environment to foster inclusivity and diversity. I aim to examine the status of marginal voices within UK digital comics, while addressing the opportunities and challenges these comics present for the British Library’s collection and preservation policies.

The opening panels from G Bear and Jammo by Jaime Huxtable, showing their caravan on The Gower Peninsula in South Wales, copyright © Jaime Huxtable

Digital comics have been identified as complex digital publications, meaning this research project is connected to the work of the broader Emerging Formats Project. On top of embracing technological change, digital comics have the potential to reflect, embrace and contribute to social and cultural change in the UK. Digital comics not only present new ways of telling stories, but whose story is told.

One of the comic creators, whose work I have been recently examining is Jaime Huxtable, a Welsh cartoonist/illustrator based in Worthing, West Sussex. He has worked on a variety of digital comics projects, from webcomics to interactive comics, and also runs various comics related workshops.

Samir's Christmas by Jaime Huxtable, this promotional comic strip was created for Freedom From Torture’s 2019 Christmas Care Box Appeal. This comic was  made into a short animated video by Hands Up, copyright © Jaime Huxtable

My thesis will explore whether the ways UK digital comics are published and consumed means that they can foreground marginal, alternative voices similar to the way underground comix and zine culture has. Comics scholarship has focused on the technological aspects of digital comics, meaning their potentially significant contribution reflecting and embracing social and cultural change in the UK has not been explored. I want to establish whether the fact digital comics can circumvent traditional gatekeepers means they provide space to foreground marginal voices. I will also explore the challenges and opportunities digital comics might present for legal deposit collection development policy.

As well as being a member of the Comics Research Hub (CoRH) at UAL, I have already begun working with colleagues from the UK Web Archive, and hope to be able to make a significant contribution to the Web Comic Archive. Issues around collection development and management are central to my research, I feel very fortunate to be based at the British Library, to have the chance to learn from and hopefully contribute to practice here.

If anyone would like to know more about my research, or recommend any digital comics for me to look at, please do contact me at [email protected] or @thmsgbhrt on Twitter. UK digital comic creators and publishers can use the ComicHaus app to send their digital comics directly to The British Library digital archive. More details about this process are here.

This post is by British Library collaborative doctoral student Thomas Gebhart (@thmsgbhrt).

It has been heartening to see many joyful responses to our recent post featuring The British Library Simulator; an explorable, miniature, virtual version of the British Library’s building in St Pancras.

If you would like to learn more about our Emerging Formats research, which is informing our work in collecting examples of complex digital publications, including works made with Bitsy, then my colleague Giulia Carla Rossi (who built the Bitsy Library) is giving a Leeds Libraries Tech Talk on Digital Literature and Interactive Storytelling this Thursday, 11^th June at 12 noon, via Zoom.

Giulia will be joined by Leeds Libraries Central Collections Manager, Rhian Isaac, who will showcase some of Leeds Libraries exciting collections, and also Izzy Bartley, Digital Learning Officer from Leeds Museums and Galleries, who will talk about her role in making collections interactive and accessible. Places are free, but please book here.

If you are a researcher, or writer/artist/maker, of experimental interactive digital stories, then you may want to check out the current call for submissions for The International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS), organised by the Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narratives, a community of academics and practitioners concerned with the advancement of all forms of interactive narrative. The deadline for proposing Research Papers, Exhibition Submissions, Posters and Demos, has been extended to the 26^th June 2020, submissions can be made via the ICIDS 2020 EasyChair Site.

ICIDS showcases and shares research and practice in game narrative and interactive storytelling, including the theoretical, technological, and applied design practices. It is an interdisciplinary gathering that combines computational narratology, narrative systems, storytelling technology, humanities-inspired theoretical inquiry, empirical research and artistic expression.

For 2020, the special theme is Interactive Digital Narrative Scholarship, and ICIDS will be hosted by the Department of Creative Technology of Bournemouth University (also hosts of the New Media Writing Prize, which I have blogged about previously). Their current intention is to host a mixed virtual and physical conference. They are hoping that the physical meeting will still take place, but all talks and works will also be made available virtually for those who are unable to attend physically due to the COVID-19 situation. This means that if you submit work, you will still need to register and present your ideas, but for those who are unable to travel to Bournemouth, the conference organisers will be making allowances for participants to contribute virtually.

ICIDS also includes a creative exhibition, showcasing interactive digital artworks, which for 2020 will explore the curatorial theme “Texts of Discomfort”. The exhibition call is currently seeking Interactive digital art works that generate discomfort through their form and/or their content, which may also inspire radical changes in the way we perceive the world.

Creatives are encouraged to mix technologies, narratives, points of view, to create interactive digital artworks that unsettle interactors’ assumptions by tackling the world’s global issues; and/or to create artworks that bring to a crisis interactors’ relation with language, that innovate in their way to intertwine narrative and technology. Artworks can include, but are not limited to:

• Augmented, mixed and virtual reality works
• Computer games
• Interactive installations
• Mobile and location-based works
• Screen-based computational works
• Web-based works
• Webdocs and interactive films
• Transmedia works

Submissions to the ICIDS art exhibition should be made using this form by 26th June. Any questions should be sent to [email protected]. Good luck!

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom) 

EXPLORING THEATRE HISTORY WITH BRITISH LIBRARY PLAYBILLS AND NEWSPAPERS

Posted on behalf of Lesley Phillips, a former Derbyshire local studies librarian in the UK and BL Labs Community Commendation Award winner for 2019 by Mahendra Mahey, Manager of BL Labs.

Lesley explains how the British Library's digital collections of playbills and digtised newspapers enabled her to compile a detailed account of the career of the actor-manager John Faucit Saville in the East Midlands 1843-1855.

John Faucit Saville was born in Norwich in 1807, the son of two actors then performing with the Norwich Company as Mr and Mrs Faucit. His parents separated when he was 14 years old and just entering on his stage career. His mother, then a leading actress at Drury Lane, moved in with the celebrated actor William Farren, and continued to perform as Mrs Faucit, while his father became a manager and changed his surname to Saville (his real name).

Oxberry's Dramatic Biography (1825) records his father's grief:

On the evening that the fatal news [of his wife's desertion] reached him [Mr John Faucit] left the theatre and walked over the beach. His lips trembled and he was severely agitated. Many persons addressed him, but he broke from them and went to the house of a particular friend. The facts were then known only to himself. Though a man of temperate habits, he drank upwards of two bottles of wine without being visibly affected. He paced the room and seemed unconscious of the presence of anyone. To his friend's inquiries he made no reply. He once said “My heart is almost broke, but you will soon know why”.

(C.E. Oxberry (ed.) Oxberry's Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes. Vol. III (1825) pp. 33-34, Memoir of William Farren)

Despite the rift between his parents, John Faucit Saville had all the advantages that famous friends and relatives could bring in the theatrical world, but during his time as an aspiring actor it soon became clear that he would never be a great star. In 1841 he began to put his energies into becoming a manager, like his father before him. He took a lease of Brighton Theatre in his wife's home town, but struggled to make a success of it.

Like the other managers of his day he was faced with a decline in the fashion for rational amusements and the rise of 'beer and circuses'. This did not deter him from making a further attempt at establishing a theatrical circuit. For this he came to the East Midlands and South Yorkshire, where the decline of the old circuit and the retirement of Thomas Manly had laid the field bare for a new man. Saville must surely have had great confidence in his own ability to be successful here, given that the old, experienced manager had begun to struggle.

Saville took on the ailing circuit, and soon discovered that he was forced to make compromises. He was careful to please the local authorities as to the respectability of his productions, and yet managed to provide more lowbrow entertainments to bring in the audiences. Even so, after a few years he was forced to reign in his ambitions and eventually reduce his circuit, and he even went back on tour as an itinerant actor from time to time to supplement his income. Saville's career had significant implications for the survival of some of the theatres of the East Midlands, as he lived through the final disintegration of the circuit.

Over the years, John Faucit Saville's acting career had taken him to Paris, Edinburgh, and Dublin, as well as many parts of England. Without the use of digital online resources it would be almost impossible to trace a career such as his, to explore his background, and bring together the details of his life and work.

Newspaper article from 29 January 1829 detailing the benefit performance for Mr Faucit entitled 'Clandestine Marriage' at the Theatre Royal Brighton

The digitised newspapers of the British Newspaper Archive https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk enabled me to uncover the Saville family origins in Bedford, and to follow John Faucit Saville's career from the heights of the London stage, to management at Brighton and then to the Midlands.

Newspaper article detailing benefit performance for Mr JF Saville at Theatre Royal Derby on Friday May 23, 1845, play entitled 'Don Caesar de Bazan' or 'Martina the Gypsy'

The dataset of playbills available to download from the British Library web site https://data.bl.uk/playbills/pb1.html enabled me to build up a detailed picture of Saville's work, the performers and plays he used, and the way he used them. It was still necessary to visit some libraries and archives for additional information, but I could never have put together such a rich collection of information without these digital resources.

My research has been put into a self-published book, filled with newspaper reviews of Saville's productions, and stories about his company. This is not just a narrow look at regional theatre; there are also some references to figures of national importance in theatre history. John Faucit Saville's sister, Helen Faucit, was a great star of her day, and his half-brother Henry Farren made his stage debut in Derbyshire with Saville's company. John Faucit Saville's wife Marianne performed with Macready on his farewell tour and also played at Windsor for Queen Victoria. The main interest for me, however, was the way theatre history reveals how national and local events impacted on society and public behaviour, and how the theatre connected with the life of the ordinary working man and woman.

Front cover of my self-published book about John Faucit Saville

If you are interested in playbills generally, you might want to help British Library provide more information about individual ones through a crowdsourcing project, entitled 'In the Spotlight'.

This is a guest post by Pete Hebden, a PhD student at Newcastle University, currently undertaking a practice-led PhD; researching and creating a poetry app. Pete has recently completed a three month placement in Contemporary British Published Collections at the British Library, where he assisted curators working with the UK Web Archive, artists books and emerging formats collections, you can follow him on Twitter as @Pete_Hebden. 

As part of my PhD research, I have been investigating how writers and publishers have used smartphone and tablet devices to present poetry in new ways through mobile apps. In particular, I’m interested in how these new ways of presenting poetry compare to the more familiar format of the printed book. The mobile device allows poets and publishers to create new experiences for readers, incorporating location-based features, interactivity, and multimedia into the encounter with the poem.

Since the introduction of smartphones and tablet computers in the early 2010s, a huge range of digital books, e-literature, and literary games have been developed to explore the possibilities of this technology for literature. Projects like Ambient Literature and the work of Editions at Play have explored how mobile technology can transform story-telling and narrative, and similarly my project looks at how this technology can create new experiences of poetic texts.

Below are a few examples of poetry apps released over the past decade. For accessibility reasons, this selection has been limited to apps that can be used anywhere and are free to download. Some of them present work written with the mobile device in mind, while others take existing print work and re-mediate it for the mobile touchscreen.

Puzzling Poetry (iOS and Android, 2016)

Dutch developers Studio Louter worked with multiple poets to create this gamified approach to reading poetry. Existing poems are turned into puzzles to be unlocked by the reader word-by-word as they use patterns and themes within each text to figure out where each word should go. The result is that often new meanings and possibilities are noticed that might have been missed in a traditional linear reading experience.

Screen capture image of  the Puzzling Poetry app

This video explains and demonstrates how the Puzzling Poetry app works:

Translatory (iOS, 2016)

This app, created by Arc Publications, guides readers in creating their own English translations of contemporary foreign-language poems. Using the digital display to see multiple possible translations of each phrase, the reader gains a fresh understanding of the complex work that goes into literary translation, as well as the rich layers of meaning included within the poem. Readers are able to save their finished translations and share them through social media using the app.

Screen capture image of the Translatory app

Poetry: The Poetry Foundation app (iOS and Android, 2011)

At nearly a decade old, the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry app was one of the first mobile apps dedicated to poetry, and has been steadily updated by the editors of Poetry magazine ever since. It contains a huge array of both public-domain work and poems published in the magazine over the past century. To help users find their way through this, Poetry’s developers created an entertaining and useful interface for finding poems with unique combinations of themes through a roulette-wheel-style ‘spinner’. The app also responds to users shaking their phone for a random selection of poem. 

Screen capture image of The Poetry Foundation app

ABRA: A Living Text  (iOS, 2014)

A collaboration between the poets Amaranth Borsuk and Kate Durbin, and developer Ian Hatcher, the ABRA app presents readers with a range of digital tools to use (or spells to cast) on the text, which transform the text and create a unique experience for each reader. A fun and unusual way to encounter a collection of poems, giving the reader the opportunity to contribute to an ever-shifting, crowd-edited digital poem.

Screen capture image of the ABRA app

This artistic video below demonstrates how the ABRA app works. Painting your finger and thumb gold is not required! 

I hope you feel inspired to check out these poetry apps, or maybe even to create your own.