digital poetry for digital portfolios - … · digital poetry as a component of digital portfolios...

English Teachers Association of NSW • mETAphor Issue 1, 201626

What electronic poetry demonstrates above all is perhaps a constant human appetite to make over space, virtual and otherwise, into surfaces suitable for inscription.

Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics

DIGITAL POETRY FOR DIGITAL PORTFOLIOS

Tony Britten

In April 2015 I presented a seven-minute presentation about Digital Poetry at TMGEG, a TeachMeet event hosted and coordinated by the

Google Educators Group. The venue was provided by Google at their amazing company headquarters in Pyrmont. I first presented the material about digital palimpsest poems at TeachMeet@theMint, hosted at the Mint by Sydney Living Museums on 12 August 2015. This article is an expanded version of these short presentations.

So why digital poetry? Poetry is a text requirement in K-12 English syllabuses in NSW. So too are multimedia and digital texts, as is the case for many other subjects. The glossary of the NSW English Syllabus for the Australian Curriculum defines digital texts in this way: Audio, visual or multimodal texts produced

through digital or electronic technology which may be interactive and include animations and/or hyperlinks. Examples of digital texts include DVDs, websites, e-literature (e-books) and apps.

http://syllabus.bos.nsw.edu.au/english/english-k10/glossary/

Digital poetry enables students to explore a range of these texts that extend beyond e-literature and the experience of composing digital texts is also a requirement in the K-10 NSW English Syllabus for the National Curriculum. Responding to and composing texts such as digital poetry allows students to develop the following General Capabilities from the NSW 7-10 English Syllabus for the Australian Curriculum that support these goals: • Literacy• Information and communication technology

capability• Critical and creative thinking

What are digital portfolios?A digital portfolio or e-portfolio is a learning process and a product. Its purpose is to showcase the skills, achievements, ideas and reflections of learners. Digital portfolios are an engaging and effective way for students to learn skills in creating digital texts, organise work for assessment, showcase their digital work for a range of audiences and reflect on the learning process. The Victorian Department of Education and Training provides the following definition of digital portfolios: A digital portfolio can be either off-line or on-

line, or combination of both. In the classroom, a digital portfolio is usually used to showcase learning and reflections over a period of time, and may provide evidence towards assessment.

Students’ digital portfolios or digital banks of evidence of learning can include products, assessment comments and rubrics, strategies and plans.

http://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/support/Pages/portfolio.aspx

Expert in Residence at Harvard University’s Innovation Lab Dr. Tony Parsons (@TonyParsons) sees digital portfolios as central to the contemporary school experience: The single most important thing you could do

tomorrow for little to no money is have every student establish a digital portfolio where they collect their best work as evidence of their skills. Where they’re working with their teachers and other adults to present their best work, to iterate their best work, so that they actually have real progress they can show.

Increasingly, digital portfolios are being used in schools in Queensland, Victoria, Norway, the USA and the United Kingdom and in universities worldwide. They are a time capsule for condensing

English Teachers Association of NSW • mETAphor Issue 1, 2016 27


learning over time, demonstrating the efforts applied and progress achieved for specific goals. Digital portfolios also provide a platform for demonstrating capabilities to teachers, accrediting bodies and potential employers. They are also used to document and support the professional learning and accreditation of teachers as is currently the practice in Western Australia.This article champions digital poetry as one of the forms that can engage students and unlock their creativity as they compile such digital portfolios.

Why should students compose digital poems and create digital portfolios?Internet pioneer and philosopher Jaron Lanier argues that the digital space of Web 2.0 has become, at least for most learners in the West, increasingly a site of commodification and passive consumption. US academic Lawrence Lessig could be said to share Lanier’s view that the dynamic culture of content creation typical of Web 1.0 has been lost. Lessig contends that we have shifted from what he describes as a read/write digital culture to one that is read only. He advocates a return to an internet culture where people ‘…create art as readily as they consume it.’Dr. Tony Parsons believes digital portfolios are a positive strategy to enable students to become digital creators: Learning in most conventional education

settings is a passive experience: The students listen. But at the most innovative schools, classes are ‘hands-on,’ and students are creators, not mere consumers. They acquire skills and knowledge while solving a problem, creating a product or generating a new understanding.

Parsons challenges educators to reflect on the following: ‘What is the relationship between responding and composing in your classroom?’ Digital poetry as a component of digital portfolios is one strategy schools can use to activate the creativity of web users in classrooms so that they are both reading and writing. It is salutary to consider how often students are asked to respond to digital texts in contrast to how often they compose them.

So what is digital poetry? Digital poetry, also known as e-poetry, internet poetry, electronic poetry, click poetry or cyber poetry, is a fairly recent form of literature. It has

existed for at least fifty years or since the advent of computer technology. The first examples of this genre date back to 1959, to poems and texts written with the help of a computer by Theo Lutz in Germany (who coined the term computer poetry) and Brion Gysin in the USA.According to the blogger antipoet, Digital Poetry fuses text with technology;

combines words with computers; marries poets with machines, to create new works.

Resurging in the 1990s digital poetry overlaps with other forms of literature and art such as installation art, hypertext fiction, holographic poetry or holo poetry, interactive poetry, code poetry and experimental video poetry. This overlapping emphasises how digital poetry can consist of sound and/or visual elements and is the creation of art that spans a range of media such as text, images, sounds and interactivity via programming. It often appears online and increasingly uses social media such as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook as a publishing platform.Definitions of this relatively new genre are hotly contested in academic circles but all definitions stress the multimodality of digital poetry.US digital artist Eric Goddard-Scovel provides the following summative definition: dig·it·al po·et·ry noun: a genre of poetry

that (1) is composed by processes involving computers and/or network technologies; (2) is experienced via an electronic medium beyond print or screen representations of printed pages and makes use of animation, interaction, hyperlinks, audio and/or video; and (3) presents an artistic and literary experience in which language is a primary aesthetic component

Griffith University lecturer and digital artist Dr. Jason Nelson argues that in …the simplest terms Digital Poems are born

from the combination of technology and poetry, with writers using all multi-media elements as critical texts. Sounds, images, movement, video, interface/interactivity and words are combined to create new poetic forms and experiences.

http://heliozoa.com/?p=125Christopher Funkhouser defines digital poetry as …a genre that fuses crafted language with new

media technology... A poem is a digital poem if



computer programming or processes (software, etc.) are distinctively used in the composition, generation, or presentation of the text (or combinations of texts)...

The blogger antipoet offers the following useful summary of Funkhouser’s division of the genre into four forms: 1. Computer poems: Poets use programs to create

databases, codes and instructions to manipulate content. Poetry is generated using algorithms and displayed as a sequences of words or other text, dependent on the programmed code. Funkhouser argues: ‘Computer poems challenge and invite the reader to participate imaginatively in the construction of the text; some mock the conventions of poetry, and others reify them…’

2. Graphical poems: These digital poems use computer programs to incorporate the visual elements of poetry. Words, letters and images are manipulated. Look, feel, and style of the poem’s graphical content are the main goals. As Funkhouser contends: ‘poems, by design, move and change before the viewer’s eyes’.

3. Hypertext and hypermedia: Poets create clickable text with words and images as hyperlinks. A click of a word can take the audience on a new path, whether random or deliberate. Narrative becomes organic as the reader chooses to click through into new text, pages or other media.

Some critics question whether the distinction between poetry and digital poetry is an artificial one. Reflecting on this perhaps arbitrary division, digital poet Marjorie Perloff quotes video artist Bill Viola: I don’t like the label ‘video artist’, I consider

myself to be an artist. I happen to use video because I live in the last part of the twentieth century, and the medium of video (or television) is clearly the most relevant visual art form in contemporary life.

Dr. Jason Nelson observes: …interactive technologies are for digital poets

what video is to Viola, another albeit more complicated and dynamic pen and paper set, new tools for an old art.

Nelson whose game-based digital poem ‘game, game’ is available free of charge (http://heliozoa.com/?p=14) has an optimistic view of the genre as a

means of both composing and publication: …when a piece like ‘game, game…’ attracts

millions of readers while a ‘successful’ print poem might attract a hundred, I think the digital truly is the future of poetry… Most people get their news, entertainment and even jobs via digital devices, so it’s only logical for poetry and art to do the same.

US educator and blogger Terry Heick agrees. Rather than being an attempt to modernize poetry, digital poetry might best be viewed as the natural consequence of the kinds of media consumed by those who create it: namely, the students and digital natives in our classrooms.

Lesson: Digital Palimpsest PoetryA terrific form of digital born poetry for students to compose is the digital palimpsest poem. Among its advantages is its use of the simple word processing software widely available in schools. A palimpsest is a document on which the writing has been removed and then replaced with new writing. The original writing is often visible under the new writing and so a layered text is created. It is something that has changed over time and shows evidence of this process of change. The word palimpsest is derived from the Latin palimpsestos, derived from the Greek palin, meaning again, and psen, to rub or scrape. Manuscripts written on vellum, made from the stomach skins of sheep or cows, were very expensive. The original text would often be scraped off so the vellum could reused to create a new text. Often the original text, faded and obscured, remains visible to the naked eye. Other palimpsest texts can only be seen by use of x ray and other technologies. Key works of the Greek mathematician Archimedes survived in the West as the ghost-like shadows in the background of vellum manuscripts. An example is the Archimedes Palimpsest which has been digitised and is available on line under a Creative Commons license: http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/digital/Digital palimpsest poems are in many ways an e-version of Austin Kleon’s newspaper Blackout poetry. Many of you will be familiar with how Blackout poetry is created using just a Sharpie pen and an article from a printed newspaper. For Austin Kleon, as he revealed in one of his Blackout poems, creativity is subtraction. A cornucopia of resources



about Blackout poetry are available for free on Kleon’s various websites, including a tutorial shared using Twitter’s new Periscope live feed platform: http://newspaperblackout.com/Kleon has resisted creating an app to create digital versions of his Newspaper Blackout Poetry as he prefers the experience of using a physical pen and newspaper. Nevertheless he has provided a link on his website to a YouTube tutorial that explains how to create a digital Newspaper Blackout Poem using an iPad or tablet: http://newspaperblackout.com/post/10406725224/blackout-poetry-tutorial-by-kiwibeasleys-usingIn contrast to Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout poems, the original text is still visible in a digital palimpsest

poem. In an online version of Jen Bervin’s found poem sequence Nets (2004), the reader can see how she has created digital palimpsest poems by simply changing the tonality of text. This might be achieved by students using a simple word processing function, such as the Font Colour function in Microsoft Word.Interactive excerpts from Nets available online allow viewers to scroll over the poem and to see the palimpsest of Shakespeare’s sonnet disappear and reappear, giving shifting prominence to Bervin’s new poem. You can read excerpts from Nets at the link: http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/bervin.htm You can buy a printed version of Nets from Blue Duckling Presse: http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=60

Image reproduced with the generous permission of the poet and Ugly Duckling Presse – http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/

Nets is a selection of 60 poems that are sourced from Shakespeare’s sonnets. The title Nets, literally emerges from the word ‘sonnets’ and reveals Bervin’s strategy of ‘netting’ selected words and phrases to create new poems. The novelist Paul Auster has observed how in Nets ‘Jen Bervin has reimagined Shakespeare as our true contemporary.’ Rather than using a raised text Bervin chose to use a faded undertext for the Shakespearean sonnets over which the words of her own poems would be netted in bold ink. This simple manipulation allows new digital poems to be sourced from an electronic copy

of The Sonnets of William Shakespeare.In a process note, Bervin describes creating Nets in the following way: I stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the

‘nets’ to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.

http://jenbervin.com/html/nets.html



Image reproduced with the generous permission of the poet and Ugly Duckling Presse – http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/

• use a range of software, including word processing programs, confidently, flexibly and imaginatively to create, edit and publish texts, considering the identified purpose and the characteristics of the user

• apply word processing functions, as well as web authoring programs, to compose and format texts for different purposes, audiences and contexts, including the workplace

Students can create a digital palimpsest poem using any word processing software to manipulate any descriptive digital text relevant to whatever subject matter or subject they might be exploring. Such source text does not have to be sourced from poetry. National Geographic and Australian Geographic articles work beautifully, as do those drawn from the food and travel section of newspapers. Unfortunately the sporting pages often tend to produce Blackout poems that consist of clichés. Using poems by a poet that extend beyond those few set for a poet study can work well, as can text from a set novel or play or wide reading text. A 50-word horoscope as the raw material for a one line Blackout poem is an effective way to quickly and concisely introduce this strategy to students. The Atlantic online magazine features a found or digital palimpsest poem that uses the text of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” List. Hyperlinks take the reader to the online article from which lines of the poem were sourced. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/found-poetry-from-times-100-most-influential-people-list/390705/

Case study: digital palimpsest poetry and convict love tokensHere I’ve bravely – or perhaps unwisely – attempted to model the teacher as maker for students by creating my own digital palimpsest poem using text from a written text about convict love tokens from the Sydney Living Museums website. It was used to model an approach to composing a digital palimpsest poem emerged from an activity about convict history that I completed with my daughter’s Year 5 class at Croydon Public School. The same activity could be completed with almost any written text related to a unit of work your students might be studying.One of the fascinating personal possessions of convicts to survive from the early European settlement of Australia are convict love tokens.

Nets provides a scaffold for a simple but fun method to create a poem of surprising complexity. The earlier text survives to comment or complement the other. You can see here how digital palimpsest poetry embodies the philosophy and impulse of active creativity inherent in Lessig’s read/write culture. Students don’t just read Shakespeare here: they write with and over the top of him.Outcome 4 of Stage 4 of the NSW English Syllabus for the Australian Curriculum requires students to: Understand and apply knowledge of language

forms and features combine visual and digital elements to create layers of meaning for serious, playful and humorous purposes

The layers of meaning required by this aspect of syllabus is most apparent in composing this form of poem. The pertinence of digital palimpsest poetry to the syllabus is also seen in the requirement that as they respond to and compose texts Stage 4 students will:• creatively adapt and transform their own or

familiar texts into different forms, structures, modes and media for a range of different purposes and audiences

• respond to and compose new print and multimodal texts, experimenting with appropriations and intertextuality

Having Stage 5 English students compose such digital palimpsest poems satisfies syllabus requirements that ask them to:



Made from low value copper coins whose original imprint has been smoothed down and then re-engraved with biographical details and messages of affection, convict love tokens were created between 1762 and 1856. Engraved by both amateurs and professionals and known as leaden hearts these emotionally charged objects were left behind or sent home to remind loved ones of those transported to a new life in New South Wales. The world’s largest collection of convict love tokens is in the National

Museum of Australia and these Year 5 students viewed this institution’s amazing digital gallery as well as other examples online to develop an individual Image Bank of the text and iconography typical of convict love tokens. This proved a useful teaching point to explore symbols: we particularly liked the many examples of birds, symbolising freedom, depicted with chains around their necks as a representation of their imprisonment as convicts

A very special love token was made in 1817 by London engraver and convict Joseph Smith for his wife Mary. It’s in the collection of Sydney Living Museums and Joseph Smith lodged at and possibly made the bricks that were used to build Hyde Park Barracks. The World Heritage-listed Hyde Park Barracks was the home of up to 50,000 convicts in the three decades after it opened in 1819. Smyth’s love token features the written text: Joseph Smyth/ Cast for death/ 4July 1817/ Aged

33 with Mary Smyth/ Aged 27 on the reverseSmyth discovered his death sentence for burglary had been reduced to transportation to New South

http://www.nma.gov.au/collections/highlights/convict-tokens

Wales after the token was made.Year 5 learned about convict love tokens using an online article about Joseph Smyth by curator Dr Fiona Starr obtained from the Sydney Museum’s website. They then transformed it into a new text using a more visual form of Austin Kleon’s technique of Blackout Poetry. • Joseph Smyth – Cast for Death

http://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/stories/joseph-smyth-cast-death

You could also use a fascinating online article from The Australian about the National Museum of Australia’s collection of love tokens.



• Every token tells a story, Christopher Pearson, The Australian, 13 December 2008 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/every-token-tells-a-story/story-e6frg7ko-1111118301986

Many teachers will have created Blackout Poems by harvesting language from texts such as newspaper articles. Our first ‘trainer wheels’ attempt at Blackout Poetry started small, and involved each student creating a one-line poem using the text from a 50-word horoscope from a newspaper. We then shared these one-line poems with the class using a document camera. From one little poet philosopher: Dealing with feelings is important. We then looked at a more complex and visually rich form of Blackout Poetry using the work of art educator and blogger Miriam Paternoster from the truly inspirational Arteascuola website. http://arteascuola.com/There’s a great Youtube clip where Paternoster models finding language for a Blackout poem within the negative space created by a drawn image. The class viewed this clip to model approaches to blacking out a poem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf6k8aW2Toc

Students used round melamine cereal bowls to randomly place then trace the outline of a coin onto the written text of a hard paper copy of the Sydney Living Museum article about Joseph Smyth’s love token. My daughter was more than quietly horrified to see our entire set of breakfast bowls in her classroom. Students then created a Blackout Poem using the language within the circle outline of their coin or love token. Differently placed circles captured different examples of language and produced highly

different poems. Students were asked to create different metaphors or analogies to describe the process of finding the language of a new text within another text.The Australian poet Felicity Plunkett prefers the metaphor harvesting whereas in his poem The Trouble with Poetry the former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins characterises his brand of poetic borrowing as the theft as cut-purses and shoplifters:• harvesting• mining• stealing• nuggeting• gleaning• reaping• nickingStudents could choose whether the Blackout Poem created using the Joseph Smyth article was about love tokens or their own subject matter. One poem was about a certain Ms Taylor Swift – and I will leave an assessment of her relative level of criminality up to you.Students then decorated their Blackout Poem using Paternoster’s YouTube scaffolds as an inspiration and using selected images and text from the Image Bank they created earlier. Some students then transcribed their text of their poems into a Word document. They edited them, adding line and stanza breaks and punctuation, while playing with the shape of the poem on the page. We discussed how found poet Annie Dillard always includes the title of the text from which she has harvested her word choices as the title of her final published poem. We also talked about how as responsible digital citizens we could use a range of ways to cite the source and

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possibly include a hyperlink to the Sydney Living Museums website to acknowledge and cite the source of the poem. We then debated whether adding this information would make the poem more or less original. Lastly we intend to publish photographs of these found or Blackout poems on the school’s Twitter account, but this will have to wait until the permission to publish forms have all been returned. Students can take digital palimpsest poetry a step further from the grey, black and white tonality of this poem. They can use the full suite of options available in the Font Colour function in Word to evoke mood and meaning through a rainbow palette of colours and colour symbolism. Another strategy to create a new poem is to strip the bolded text from the palimpsest and play with layout, indentations and line breaks to create a new poem.Joseph Smyth – Cast for Death (Sydney Living Museums)


rare personal small specialsmoothing pennies, engraving lovemade by convicts a partingtoken:Mary Ann and Joseph (1817).

http://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/stories/joseph-smyth-cast-death

This version of my poem includes the title of Dr Fiona Starr’s original article and the URL of the website version to acknowledge the original source of the language that had been appropriated. Yet another possibility is to have students produce a short piece of prose writing, such as a short story, life writing or vignette and then mine their own language choices to compose a palimpsest poem. In 2012 Australian verse novelist and poet Tim Sinclair was commissioned to compose a poem for Liverpool Girls’ High School by The Red Room Company. His palimpsest poem Reappearing was produced in response to blackout poem activities completed with Liverpool Girls’ students as part of a workshop for Red Room Education. Reappearing might be described as a prose work that contains a poem that emerges in bolded text within his reflection on the day’s events. http://redroomcompany.org/poem/tim-sinclair/reappearing/A great deal of digital poetry is available online for free. A key resource is the Electronic Literature Collection. http://collection.eliterature.org/1/The BBC website also has a free collection of digital visual poetry available for students to explore: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/poetry/ondisplay/Helioza.com is an online collection of digital poems curated by Dr. Jason Nelson, whose work has been published and exhibited internationally: http://heliozoa.com/

digital poetry for digital portfolios - … · digital poetry as a component of digital portfolios...

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