Project Report By: Wilfredo Hernández and Zaira O. Rivera Casellas, Spanish, Trinity College
The main objective of this project was to facilitate the understanding of technical terms related to the study of poetry at the intermediate and advanced Spanish language courses. We thought of providing a web-based interactive glossary of poetry terminology, where students could find definitions and multiple examples, and having the terms linked to specific occurrences in the annotated poem. We had periodical meetings between March and May to discuss the content and design of the web-page. We divided the work into three parts. Each of us chose to work on poems from Spanish and Latin American literature which covered: Medieval and Golden Age, Nineteenth Century, and Twentieth century.
By the end of May, 1999 George Abdelnour was not part of the team. We met to discuss the necessary changes to comply our duties. We decided that, instead of continuing with the original three periods, the most convenient solution was to focus on poetry which was part of our own research interests. Writing our dissertations on minority literature topics, we selected poems that deal with the representations of Afro-Hispanics and gay people in Latin American. From last Fall until last March we analyzed and annotated two poems, and developed the glossaries of literary terms and metric, as three separate sections. With the assistance of Emmanuel Paris-Bouvret our initial work started to shape into a web-based page.
In March, Ana María Pérez-Gironés made us aware that, in order to make our work pedagogically more effective and achieve our initial objective, we should combine the annotated poems with the glossaries of literary terms and metric, and the exercises into interconnected sections. Since then, we have followed her input on the creation of the interactive exercises, which represent our current work in progress. We plan to complete this last stage of the project by the end of May, 2000. The final product will be presented at the AATSP Annual Meeting to be held in Puerto Rico in August. Hopefully the page will be available to consortial institutions, colleagues, and students by Fall 2000.