In a sense, the virtual tour of John Ashbery’s Nest (http://vr.ashberyhouse.yale.edu/) is able to digitally restore the poet’s house and create a user experience as if one was to enter his home and learn about his life. The audience is able to learn in-depth stories and inspirations behind who he is through the artifacts and architecture of his home. The sources include the house itself and John Ashbery. From the acknowledgements, we can learn that the sources are gathered from Open Road Media, The Poetry Foundation, Archie Rand, and Yale Media. These sources are processed through recordings of him speaking, 360 degree photographs of every house corner and artifacts, and video on John Ashbury himself and the entrance of his home. The sources are presented in a format in which the user can easily click on artifacts such as his Umbrella Stand and Hiroshige images, read the creator’s own analysis of Ashbery’s memorabilia, and listen to Ashbery’s own related dialogue such as him reading “37 Haiku.”
However, this tour is not enough to capture entirely who he is, all his famous work, and his overall material representation. The project attempts to do even more in the sidebar menu, where the user can access even more in-depth information on tabs such as “Selected Poems” and “John Ashbery.” John Ashbery (http://ashberyhouse.yale.edu/poet/john-ashbery) provides a short biography wrote up from multiple text sources, in order to celebrate his milestones and accomplishments. Sources include his notable poems processed through photographs of the covers, and presented as an interactive timeline that is effectively organized in chronological order with the cover photos of his notable work and titles. From the timeline, we can learn that he has been writing poetry from 1953, and has been a very prolific writer especially from the 60s onward to the present day. One can easily scroll through the timeline to see the generation’s influence on his work through the progression in cover art design. However, this would be even better if we could see excerpts within the text which the timeline lacks.
In the Selected Poems (http://ashberyhouse.yale.edu/collections/selected-poems), the sources are his poems himself, processed by extracting the text of the poem onto a website with HTML and CSS, and presented as list in alphabetical order onto a webpage. The reader is able to conveniently access seven of his notable poems spanning from 1970 to 2002; however in this digital archive, the poem loses the material representation and we lose humanist details such as Ashbery’s handwriting; however, at the same time the reader could focus more on analyzing the written content itself. All in all, John Ashbery’s Nest does an effective job of not just telling, but showing who he really is as a human being.