Stride Design

Contact: 'Vicky Smith' <vicky.smith@stridedesign.com>

Initial contact: Andrew Nairne <acn36@cam.ac.uk>

Project manager on behalf of Carol Ann Duffy: Helen Taylor - pa.poetlaureate@googlemail.com

The Poet Laureate's Web Thresholds

The Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has appointed 10 leading poets to work with Cambridge University Museums and young people from the county. Your task is to provide a novel tool that can emulate the exact layout of any page from a museum web server, but with the original text (perhaps partly) removed. Invited poets and young people should be able to substitute their own poetry or other text by typing directly over the visual layout as if in a drawing editor. These transformed pages can then be published and viewed from an alternative server that offers a "mashed up" version of any museum page for public viewing. The technical challenge is to give users the impression that they are really typing directly onto the rendered web page, as if onto a piece of paper, and to do so in a way that emhasises typographic freedom, allowing poets direct control over all concrete aspects of the juxtaposed text.

Earlier draft and title to be discarded:

Site-specific poetry mash-ups

In most websites, the words are the real content (even Google image search relies on captions to work properly). But the goal of this project is to preserve everything except the words. Your task is to create a website mash-up tool that allows even non-technical users to modify or transform the words of a site when viewed from an alternative URL, or with an alternative client. This project is in collaboration with a scheme where six Cambridge museums will each be hosting a high-profile poet in residence. You need to design a tool that will be easily usable by a professional poet, but give them enough technical freedom to augment, interpret, or even subvert the museum's collection via its website.