Respond to statements made by public officials. In the demonstration above, I’ve used tweets made by President Trump. There are project prompts that appear above the tweet and a form field below for users to enter one line of poetry or more. In the above example, there are 200 possible combinations of project prompt and trump tweet.
In the future, instead of using trump tweets that have occurred in the past, I will include videos and quotes of recent controversial statements made by government officials. The project prompts will be unbiased. Use poetry to engage in political conversation.
The many poetic and political conversations can be combined using an algorithm into large response poems to each of the government officials. These response poems are an unofficial average of community response.
Regarding predicting the outcome of an election, this could act as an alternative to traditional polling.
March 17, 2018 at 12:07 am
Interesting! I think the concept is fascinating, and it definitely represents something that you were thinking about in terms of the political power of poetry. It’s also more immediate. I think there are some potential pitfalls (basically, trusting the crowd and what they come up with, which could be really disappointing.)
I’m also not entirely sure what you mean by this: “I could also use an algorithm to generate an average response poem for people of different genders, races, religions, geographical locations, and socioeconomic classes therefore allowing for response comparison.” Are you talking about returning a poem to the user based on whatever categories they suggest?
March 21, 2018 at 12:01 am
Thanks for the feedback Lillian! When I first wrote this post I jumped to a false conclusion when I suggested that it could be an alternative to polling. Now that the idea has developed a bit further, I’m realizing that it will likely do something entirely different than polling, people would be responding creatively instead of merely filling out a form, and it would be pointless to compare responses for different genders, races, religions, geographical locations, etc. like traditional polling. After leaving workshop today, I realized that it might be better to approach the user input from an educational standpoint. Educators encourage learner response so that they can identify and address misconceptions through their teaching. Similarly, this program could be used to identify misconceptions about government and science. I can specifically address any misconceptions about earth science in my earth science article translations, and the misconceptions revealed about the workings of government would be useful in a similar way.