My collaborator Leslie and I just returned from the Communicating Forms conference at the University of Chicago where we presented our current project Narrative Atlas. Communicating Forms was my first experience at an art history and literature conference so I wasn’t sure what the reaction to our project would be, as it relied extensively on natural language processing to assist in readership of traditional literary texts. We received an amazing response from the rest of the conference however. It was great to see that people were open to the idea and interested in participating in later versions of the project. The fact that our project was referenced in multiple panels and lectures following our presentation was evidence to me of how much people were engaged with it. The multidisciplinary perspective of the conference was pretty eye-opening for me in terms of the feedback we received. Because we weren’t engaging in discussions with other programmers, I got a much better sense of the types of usability that the literary community was interested in for the project. Our discussions made it clear that we needed to focus on developing the online interface for the program as soon as possible. Now that we’re back, I’m ready to get into reworking the alpha of the program into something that we can release to a group of test users in the near future. More updates to come!