This project was completed with the intent to discover a potential correlation between a specific historical event, World War I, and the impact it might have had on how people perceived nature before, during, and after it happened. Our team decided to use poetry and its features of nature to prompt our research of this project.
In observing the data collected from our computer science team and placing this data into bar charts, there is not an apparent correlation between World War I and the expression of nature in the poems. However, this conclusion would not apply to other scenarios. Conducting the same test, but on another historical event and the poems surrounding this event may produce a different conclusion.
Additionally, our team may have wanted to get a larger sample size for pre-WWI and post-WWI poems. This would have allowed us to get a clearer view of any differences between each sample, and just generally have a more supportive conclusion. Further analysis could be done on the various poems if the time permitted, but from the data gathered, there is a consistency of the line count, word count, and Type Token Ratio between the poems before, during, and after the war. Thus, the consistency points towards no correlation between World War I and the expression of nature.
In conclusion for our team’s analysis of annotations, the specific ideas and points we viewed as most important and hoped to convey with our project were historical insights into World War I specifically, and how there is an area of overlap with literature, such as poetry. It was best attempted to explain the connections with simple language and additional resources such as maps and photos to aid in more fluid comprehension for a younger, educated audience interested in learning more about the war, poetry, or both.
Our other goals included giving readers the opportunity to be able to interact with our page in a manner that allows them to be fully immersed in the story that our main poem, “In Flanders Fields,” tells about its soldiers and the battles that they fought. We were hopeful that those elements, such as photos or audio recordings, would transport them to the moment in time described by the poem in order to better consider the possibilities of our research question despite the results.