Networking the New American Poetry was a Digital Humanities project funded by the Emory Libraries & Information Technology of Emory University. The project was overseen by Kevin Young, who was the libraries curator, but led by Brian Croxall (Project Lead) and Lisa Chinn (Research Lead) up until 2015. After Croxall and Chinn left the project, various individuals continued to run the project, but there are too many to mention, and none made an impact upon the project significant enough to warrant mentioning.<\/p>\n
Networking the New American Poetry (NNAP) was an attempt by digital researchers at Emory to define the various trends and schools of poetry that emerged\/were popular during the twentieth century. By focusing on roughly a dozen journals of poetry from the twentieth century and analyzing the poetry, authors, editors, and various other details within the journals, researchers hoped to be able to definitively define and describe the nature of poetry in the twentieth century.<\/p>\n
Much like the GTP, NNAP does not have a specified target audience, but rather aimed to collect and present hard data pertaining to a specific topic. There is no fundamental argument behind the NNAP, rather a desire to map trends and schools of poetry, in a manner similar to how the GTP maps the journey of scholars through eighteenth century Italy. While elements of the NNAP could certainly be used in attempts to prove certain points, there is no argumentative aspect to the project itself.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, due to what appears to be the limitations of copyright law, a flawed research approach, and the fracturing of core staff, NNAP seems to be left unfinished. While true that a dozen twentieth-century poetry journals have been \u201ccatalogued\u201d in some way or form, there has been little analysis of the data therein. Due to copyright, the poems themselves were not able to be catalogued in digital form within this project, and only the names and author details of the poems, leading to little room for analysis. Sadly, no definitive conclusion regarding the prominent themes or schools of poetry within the twentieth century was reached.<\/p>\n
Similar to the GTP\u2019s reliance on a single source, NNAP looked to Donald Allen\u2019s The New American Poetry, 1945-1960<\/em> for the dozen poetry journals that were analyzed throughout the course of the project. Researchers organized and catalogued every issue of the poetry journals presented in Allen\u2019s work, listing the names of the journal\u2019s issue, poems, authors, editors, etc. There is also a visualization aspect to the NNAP, as researchers explored visual links between poems. These links vary: a poem can be related to another poem because they were published within the same journal, written by the same author, or even edited by the same editor. This visualization of poetic links is arguably the most successful aspect of NNAP, as it shows hard, quantifiable, and new data.<\/p>\n NNAP began in 2014, and ran steadily up until 2015, when both the Project and Research Lead (Croxall and Chinn) relocated their efforts to other digital endeavors. Various researchers continued efforts within NNAP until 2016, when the project ultimately fell apart due to lack of leadership and unclear goals.<\/p>\n In terms of strengths, the NNAP website is very well organized, and the project itself is structured with a considerable amount of clarity. The primitives of gathering, conversion, and network analysis are very apparent throughout the project. However, NNAP simply has too many weaknesses to be an effective Digital Humanities project. The inability to publish poetry based off of copyright law incredibly diminishes the effectiveness of the project, as researchers are essentially forced to analyze poetry trends without the actual poetry. The downfall of the project was a shift in leadership, and ultimately the project fell apart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Networking the New American Poetry was a Digital Humanities project funded by the Emory Libraries & Information Technology of Emory University. The project was overseen by Kevin Young, who was the libraries curator, but led by Brian Croxall (Project Lead) and Lisa Chinn (Research Lead) up until 2015. After Croxall and Chinn left the project, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-humanities-project-evaluations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w18dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w18dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w18dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w18dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w18dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w18dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w18dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions\/148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w18dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w18dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w18dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}