The Toronto Poetry Map – A New Pattern for Our Digital Projects
The Toronto Poetry Map is currently unavailable due to a technical issue with the site. We apologize for any inconvenience. Updated May 16, 2023.
We launched the Toronto Poetry Map at the start of April to mark National Poetry Month, and I've been pleased by both the media interest and the social media traffic. I had a strong personal interest in this project as a reader of Canadian poetry, so it was a particular pleasure to serve as the technical lead – I don't normally get to combine my academic background in literature with my career as a librarian and software developer.
The poetry map originated in a collaboration between the library and the city's fourth Poet Laureate, George Elliott Clarke. I think it provides a unique way to explore Toronto through poems associated with the city’s neighbourhoods, intersections and landmarks.
The map in a technical sense represents a very new way of working for us – it's our first released project using Ruby on Rails, a web development framework that will no doubt be familiar to some of our more technically-oriented readers. Rails let us turn around a great experience in record time and promoted an iterative, collaborative working style that I favour for web application development.
It's also:
- our first released application built from the beginning for mobile layout
- our first cloud-deployed application (on DigitalOcean if you're curious)
At heart, the decision to use a new approach was made due to content requirements and a need to be able to easily add new poems and features in the future. The poetry map data model is surprisingly complex and multi-dimensional – a location can have multiple poems associated with it, or a poem can mention multiple locations, and we needed to be able to model those relationships in the underlying data in order to deliver the desired experience.
Longer term, I'm hoping to reuse some of the approaches and technologies to rapidly build similar applications – maybe even open source the code so others can build their own maps for their own places.
3 thoughts on “The Toronto Poetry Map – A New Pattern for Our Digital Projects”
Poems for the Toronto Poetry Map by Susan Glickman
1.Cedarvale Ravine:
“Breath”in The Smooth Yarrow, Montreal: Vehicule Press, 2012
2.The Art Gallery of Ontario:
“Le Chien Noir” takes place in front of the Krieghoff collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario; it was published in Running in Prospect Cemetery: New and Selected Poems, Montreal: Vehicule Press, 2008
“Henri Moore’s Sheep” also takes place at the AGO, in the Henry Moore Gallery; it was published in Henry Moore’s Sheep and Other Poems,
3.Prospect Cemetery
“Running in Prospect Cemetery” is set there. It was published in Hide & Seek: Montreal, Vehicule Press, 1994
4. Lake Ontario
“Brie Sandwiches” published in The Power to Move, Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1986
5. Bay and King
“Mirage” in The Power to Move, Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1986
6. The Humber River
“Birdwatching along the Humber, in The Power to Move, Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1986
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Wow, Alan, this is so interesting—first I’m hearing of it. Thank-you, I look forward to exploring.
As an aside, I’d also like to thank you folks for starting to list fiction authors’ series in order of the volumes’ publication. A brilliant idea and great time-saver.