Assessing Poetry Markup with NUScholar

Abstract

Scansion is the process of identifying the rhythm of a poem, which plays an important part in the process of analysing a poem by assisting readers in understanding its textual and contextual meaning. Usually, poetry students are taught to practice scansion on paper. In a time when digital media is assisting students through interactive learning in many fields, scansion is not much benefitted from it. Through this thesis we tried to provide a computer-based solution where users could practice scansion, with the added benefits of a digital medium. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the stakeholders of the project to gather the functional and design requirements for the system under consideration. Based on these requirements, we implemented an online scansion tool. We undertook an evaluation of the application to learn whether the system supports the scansion practice task in the way it is supposed to, if the additional features are beneficial in the learning process and which features needed improvement, along with an evaluation of the overall project. The results suggest that, although some features needed improvements, the users liked the application and expressed their interest in using it for practice.