Seeking Teachers of Poetry to Test our New Annotation Tool

For the past few months, JSTOR Labs has been working on Annotation Space, a tool to help teachers of poetry.  Annotation Space lets teachers share a poem with their class to annotate and discuss, informed by scholarship from JSTOR about the poem.  It was developed in partnership with two incredible organizations: Hypothesis and the Poetry Foundation.  Now, we’re looking for a handful of teachers to test-drive this cool tool in their classrooms during this spring semester.  For the test-drive, we’ll set up access to the tool for you and your students -- all we’d ask is that you construct an assignment for your class around this tool, and that it be possible for us to gather feedback afterward from you and your students.  If you might be interested, let us know!

But wait, how do you know if you’d be interested if you haven’t seen it?  Let me step you through the tool to give you an idea what you might expect:

First, you the teacher choose a poem (see the selection we have to work with, below). We’ll set up a private site for just you and your class, which will look like this:

You and your students can make both personal annotations as well as ones that are seen by the entire class. These annotations appear on separate “tabs.”

To make an annotation, just highlight text in the poem and click the icon.

When your students want to bolster their annotations with scholarship, they hop over to the "JSTOR" tab, where they can browse through articles that quote each line of the poem.

If you’re interested in testing this with your class, shoot us an email at labs@ithaka.org. Your input while we’re still polishing and refining this site will be invaluable.  Thanks.

Here’s the list of poems you’ll be able to choose from:

The Soldier – Rupert Brooke    
Concerning a Nobleman – Caroline Dudley  
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock – T. S. Eliot    
Snow – Robert Frost    
The Witch of Coos – Robert Frost    
Night Piece – James Joyce    
First Fig – Edna St. Vincent Millay    
To Whistler, American – Ezra Pound    
In a Station of the Metro – Ezra Pound    
Eros Turannos – Edwin Arlington Robinson    
Chicago – Carl Sandburg    
Sunday Morning – Wallace Stevens    
Anecdote of the Jar – Wallace Stevens    
The Snow Man – Wallace Stevens
Spring – William Carlos Williams    
Chinese New Year – Edith Wyatt
The Fisherman – William Butler Yeats    
The Scholars – William Butler Yeats    
A Prayer for My Daughter – William Butler Yeats