There are gender wars, and then there are casualties. It wasn’t until 2011 that the behemoth toymaker LEGO acknowledged girls’ desire to build with bricks, even though the company had long before made a seemingly effortless pivot to co-branding, video games, and major motion pictures. So it’s little wonder that girls face all-too-real obstacles when […]
Read more
ISSN 1541-8820 June 2009 Volume XXIX Number
Spicy Poetry
A technology called SpicyNodes is being used by the Insti- tute for Dynamic Educational Advancement (IDEA) to make poetry, including its history and forms, more engaging and interactive. The “Poetry through the Ages” website is poetry in motion—literally.
You can explore the website in a traditional manner, fol- lowing the hierarchically displayed lists of heading and sub- headings, or you can use SpicyNodes to create a nodal interface, vaguely reminiscent of the fish-eyed forms of browsing, where things “up close” appear in greater detail than do things in the distance.
The website also introduces a new poetic form called node poems. Node poems use not only words but also color schemes, soundscapes, and thee-dimensional images to convey a poem. Node poems also create a new dynamic between the poet and the reader. The reader may construct and manipulate the node poem as he or she pleases. You can even write your own spicy nodal poem from scratch.
The SpicyNodes interface is free for any artistic use. From cell phone novels to node poems, the 21st century is shap- ing up to be an interesting century of experimentation with new forms of cre- ative literature. Libraries of the 21st cen- tury should start collecting, organizing, adding metadata to, providing access to, and archiving these new forms.
—Tom Peters
Original: https://journals.ala.org/sln/issue/download/329/92