Writing Practice at the Dawn of the Digital Era
11 Contemporary Poets on writing through the advent of the personal computer and into the
arrival of the digital age.
About the Project
CTRL-Shift is an online collection of audio recordings, transcripts, process visualizations, and data analyses broken out from interviews conducted with 11 prominent contemporary American poets from across the United States.
The poets interviewed include: Rae Armantrout, Bruce Beasley, Amy Gerstler, Louise Glück, James McMichael, K. Silem Mohammad, Robert Pinsky, Michael Ryan, Stephanie Strickland, Nance Van Winckel, and Robert Wrigley (below).
The project examines recent changes in writing practices that occurred due to the advent of the computer and the
arrival of the digital age and investigates new modes of working with and publishing data from qualitative interview
studies.
More about the project ...
The Interviews
We have interview material in a variety of formats for your listening/viewing/reading pleasure
We've also broken the interviews down
by Subject
by Question
by Respondent
and by Icon
by which we mean medium/material/writing practice
So What Did We Find?
We have come up with some initial observations regarding some of the central areas we investigated. They can be found on our Findings page.
Our primary intent with this material, however, was not to make some grand claim about what's changed, as we'd need a bigger and more representative study for that, but rather to open up the data for you, random Internet citizen, for your own investigations and discoveries and in order for those interested to learn more about these wonderful writers
Flotsam
All our data and the code for this website is available on GitHub, and via this site.
And don't leave without letting us generate a poem for you