Trubadour

Home page, choose a basic category to begin reading
Poet bio
Conversations on a poem
Recommend a poem to a friend

Inspiration

Poetry is an art form that has not experienced significant technology-driven innovation for distribution/ delivery. Yet we were inspired by the power of poetry--it is uniquely human, conveying the human experience through language. We wanted to create a discovery portal that connects people to the poetry that they _ want _ to read, and to create a community around meaningful artistic connection.

What it does

The app that we've prototyped provides an easy way to read, react to, share, collect, and comment on poems. After choosing one of 9 basic categories (i.e. a great poem should..."inspire me"; tell a story"; "teach me something"; challenge the status quo"), a poem automatically appears in your feed. You can "thumbs up," "thumbs down," or "love" the poem, and your reaction influences what you read next. This method of navigation, along with search and the ability to view others' collections/ playlists, allows users to have the experience they want.

How we built it

We used Invision to demo Trubadour's functionality and features giving a taste of our plans to create a more accessible community for poetry. The Poem Genome Project allowed us to categorize poems based on their styles and effects, which will guide further recommendations in the user's feed.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was realizing that, given time and skill constraints, we couldn't implement our prototypes in code. Whereas we could mock up the designs and user experience flow, it was necessary to postpone execution, especially concerning integration with Excel data on individual poems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the progress we made in determining the user experience for the app and defining future capabilities. We worked collaboratively as a team on concepting, using Invision, and improving our ability to pitch and communicate our ideas. We also gave ourselves realistic expectations to prioritize our time together.

What we learned

Creating a solution to help make poetry more accessible requires a large-scale plan and resources. Though we could develop parts of the whole, it will take a concentrated, sustained effort to launch a successful platform. We also learned that there is a real need to be addressed and that technology can help people have more meaningful experiences with poetry.

What's next for Trubadour

In the next phase, we hope to create a scalable, interactive demo that gives personal recommendations and allows for the users to start interacting with the app and other users. In the far future, we want to apply our recommendation system to a broader set of poems and be able to more accurately recommend content to users. We think machine learning could be applied to automate the poem review process and allow us to vastly increase our database.