A Graphical Interface for the Dodge Poetry Festival Archive

The Dodge Poetry Festival is a biennial four-day event at which American and international poets read their own poetry out loud to relatively large, attentive audiences. In this paper, we report on a prototype graphical interface designed to let users access high quality video recordings of these poetry readings. The goal is to create an interface that draws high school students in particular into the experience of listening to poetry. This prototype is the first step in a plan to build a working system for a small portion of the Archive collection that can then be realistically evaluated. From a historical perspective, the archive provides a high-quality record of poets of the late 20
^th
and early 21
^st
centuries reading their own poems and and discussing their work with festival attendees.