Reinventing the Classroom Edition: <title rend="italic">Paradise Lost Book IX Flash Audiotext Olin Bjork Olin Bjork Georgia Institute of Technology olin.bjork@lcc.gatech.edu

Olin Bjork is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he teaches courses in composition, literary/cultural studies, technical communication, and web design. His research interests include John Milton, Textual Studies, the Digital Humanities, Instructional Technology, and Computers and Writing. He recently received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as assistant director of the Computer Writing and Research Lab (CWRL), taught literature and composition courses in the CWRL's computer-assisted classrooms, and worked as the English department's webmaster. For the past several years, he has worked as technical editor of an electronic edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost http://www.laits.utexas.edu/miltonpl and, more recently, an electronic edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass http://www.laits.utexas.edu/leavesofgrass.

 000056 003 3 article 29 September 2009

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Flash audiotext edition gives new voices to Milton's timeless epic
Poster Abstract

In the spring of 2005, Professor John Rumrich and I applied for and received a grant from the University of Texas at Austin to develop a digital classroom edition of Paradise Lost, John Milton's seventeenth-century poem. Our prototype audiotext of Book Nine of the twelve-book epic incorporates and synchronizes text, explanatory notes, and audio within a Flash interface that resembles a book lying open on a table. It uses a karaoke-style moving highlight to indicate the line currently being played in the audio track and a stationary highlight to mark annotated words and phrases. The application allows students to read the notes with less disruption to the reading experience than is possible with footnotes or endnotes: when the audiotext is in annotation mode, notes replace the text on the page opposite the one being read/heard. During audio playback, furthermore, the pages turn automatically, largely alleviating the interruption of page-turning and so encouraging users to continue reading. The guiding principle of our interface runs counter to that of hypertext theory and praxis — we seek to keep the user centered and focused on the primary text, which students find difficult to read due to its intricate syntax and archaic expressions. To facilitate an adequate depth of immersion, we avoid implementing potentially distracting website features that are useful in some contexts but have made reading literature online an unappealing prospect for many: hyperlinks, pop-up windows, and scrollbars. The audio voiceover serves to increase reading comprehension and confidence by allowing users to listen to experienced readers whose understanding of the poem is communicated through vocal pacing and inflection. The audiotext's combination of oral and visual language is especially fitting for an epic poem like Paradise Lost, which the blind Milton dictated to scribes. In alternative viewing modes, students can type and save their own notes and display a semi-diplomatic transcript of our 1674 copy-text (with a font similar to the original) in parallel with our modernized, annotated, reading (and listening) text. We have recently added audiotexts of books one and two of the epic to the project website at http://www.laits.utexas.edu/miltonpl.

Poster

Download poster (PDF file) .