The Poet’s Almanac
A context-aware poetry application using live weather conditions and editorial curation to connect literature, place, season, and mood.
Can environmental context become part of literary curation?
The Poet’s Almanac explored context-aware literature by allowing current weather conditions to participate in selecting what a reader encountered. Rather than treating weather as a decorative background, the application used live data as an editorial input connecting poetry, mood, season, and place.
A computational selection system grounded in editorial judgment.
I designed and developed the application in collaboration with Richard Jones, editor of Poetry East. We worked from approximately 30 weather-adjacent poems associated with the journal’s Seasons material. Jones helped establish temperature thresholds and weather categories so that the computational rules reflected an editor’s literary judgment rather than arbitrary developer settings.
My role
Designer · Developer. I designed and built the application and weather-data workflow; Richard Jones served as the formal literary/editorial collaborator who helped map weather conditions to appropriate poetry.
Live weather became a contextual query into a curated poetry collection.
The application accessed current weather conditions, compared those conditions against editorially defined temperature and weather thresholds, and selected a poem appropriate to that context. The result was a small ambient-computing experiment: the same reader could receive a different literary encounter because the world outside the screen had changed.
The application was publicly released and reached audiences beyond the literary-computing community.
The Poet’s Almanac was publicly released in 2014. It received coverage including a mention in O, The Oprah Magazine, as well as attention from literary outlets and libraries including NewPages, Tuesdays with Story, and Chatham University Library.