In the Fall of 2019, Lauren McNeill and I started the Teen Titans project, where our goal was to mark up data and metadata of transcripts of the Teen Titans original series (2003) and the 1980's comic The New Teen Titans. We used XML to mark up both texts, then with the help of Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar and Alyssa Argento, I styled the website to be able to put up the texts in a certain section of it. This part of the project was lengthy because of how many episodes there were to go through; I ended up doing about half of those, whereas Lauren did the other half and the comic book markup of metadata. I was then able to take the information given in the episode XML files and output Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to show which characters spoke the most within any given episode. The episode files also allowed me to run Javascript to be able to toggle colors on and off where each of the Titans spoke within the transcripts. After organizing all of the work, we were able to run Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) to make transformations of the XML files. This allowed us to organize them up on the website to have the tv episodes with their corresponding comics on the same page.
For Digital Storytelling 2, we were tasked with creating our own project however we'd like, as long as it has digital components of it, as opposed to a static blog. My project is being hosted on this site (the Poems tab). I call it "The Lonely Months project: On the Days When I Can't Think of Myself, I Think About You Instead." These are still a work in progress, but I will have the poem available to read on the page, as well as the digital part: visual poetry. These will be primarily comprised of little video snippets and some images, with me reading the poem as a voiceover. This will further tell the story that the poems already tell, since the viewers will get the visual aspect, as well as hearing me read the poems out loud.
I hope to be able to give a visual aspect to some of my poetry to invoke a deeper meaning in the words, both for myself as the writer, and for my audience: The consumers, the ones who can still find love in the words they read even while they ache for their own outlet. The escapers, who need what I needed when I was younger– the ones who know the weight and the worth of a sentence and that if you blink too soon you might miss the next phase of your life. And for the doubters, the ones who don’t think that words on a page, or on a screen, or in the mind, can have any kind of effect.