Poem Selections

[kes213]

Hi, guys,

Okay, so I've been thinking about how many poems we should have for our project. I think we should start off by each picking two poets to work with. Here's the list I mentioned before, but if you guys do a little research on your own and find a different poet you'd want to do, I'm not stopping you! :)

Here are the poets I think we should look at: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Ann Spencer, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Effie Lee Newsome

I'd like to look at Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. I think if we each pick 2 poets and look at 10 poems each by those 2 poets, that gives us a solid 60 poems for the project. Most of these poems are small, so I think that's manageable for us all. . . what do you guys think?? Which poets would you like to claim?

Tylar, I know you wanted to incorporate newspaper articles into this project too. Have you looked at any you want to add? If you want to do that, maybe Liz and I could do the poems and you could just do the newspaper articles. We would still have 40 poems that way, which is a nice number. Maybe 15 articles to provide context for our findings?

I'm in the process of finishing a schema that I think will work for what we want to mark up -- i.e, lines, stanzas, punctuation, theme, etc. I'm hoping to push it here today, so once I do, take a look at it and let me know if you have other suggestions for it.

Thanks guys! @tal80 @flowerbee1234 @ebeshero @jonhoranic

[jonhoranic]

@tal80 @flowerbee1234 @kes213 Sounds like you guys have a solid plan! Let me jump in for a moment and point a few things out.

1. We should look into the possible availability of your documents! Digital resources will be the most effective, both for saving time and to minimize the workload. If you have physical copies you will have to spend time transcribing, even if they are short poems/news-bites. I did some looking around and I found this on Project Gutenberg (I highly recommend it as a resource, though it may not have everything you need).

2. I would recommend making task lists or open separate issues for each poet/resource/paper (or however you wish to group them) so you do not get swamped with files. Making sure everyone is on the same page with what is done or not is VERY important to avoid merge conflicts and other stressors!

3. Organize as best you can! Know when you plan on meeting (via github or otherwise) and build a good file management system for this repo! Note: GitHub will NOT display empty folders, you will have to place a file inside for it to be visible in the web interface! When I make new folders, I place a dummy file inside that I will edit and rename later just so I can get my "filing cabinet" all laid out first.

[ebeshero]

@kes213 @tal80 @flowerbee1234 I wonder if these online assemblages of materials might be helpful as digital "seed-starts" for your project markup?

• https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/harlem-renaissance

• https://blogs.stockton.edu/harlempoets/sub-topic-1/

• @jonhoranic is wise in saying it's helpful to find digital resources to begin with (and he'd know because he and his team last fall did a LOT of transcription for the Graveyard Project! But you may actually want to do some transcription work for this project if you're not finding everything you need available in a convenient digital text. If you have a really good print anthology of Harlem Renaissance poems that you like, I'd recommend doing Google searches for those poems individually--they turn up in various collections on the web:

• Look up the title and author of each poet or poem in a print book in Google and see if they turn up in a collection like this one: http://www.afropoets.net/
  That's a site with LOTS of poetry packed inside, but it's difficult to navigate. Google Searches for specific things turn up good material. Save local copies of those poems in tidy directory here in your GitHub repo.

• Here's a print anthology in preview mode on Google Books that you won't be able to read or copy from, but you could start mining it: look up each of the poets and the poems on Google and start downloading the work you find.

• Are you interested in Harlem Renaissance magazines like The Crisis, where the poems were originally published? You can read some of these on the web! Here's The Crisis archived on Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-EIEAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_all_issues_r&cad=1&atm_aiy=1930#all_issues_anchor

• @tal80 I think knows how to access the Pittsburgh Courier: I wonder if there's a good way to search and see which Harlem Renaissance poets turn up published in issues of the Courier?

[ebeshero]

One last thing: When you're working with poetry, you're likely to find the web makes questionable productions--you might see errors or even incomplete versions of a poem online. If you have a good quality print collection of the material, it's a good idea to use it in a round of proof checking to help make it so your digital project improves on the web resources available. Your application of XML markup will already be enriching the available information we can track about these writers and their time, so it makes sense to improve what's available by default in places like poetry foundation, etc. In a way, you're producing your own edited collection and determining some quality production standards as well as introducing a thread of research with your XML markup.

I'm really excited to see this project take shape! :-)

[kes213]

I was mainly looking to just use the Poetry Foundation as a source for our documents, so that sounds good to me!