Langston Hughes, 1902-1967
James Mercer Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri, 1902, spent his childhood being raised by his grandmother. Hughes began to write poetry after moving to Lincoln, Illinois. He attended university at Columbia University in New York City and held many jobs during his time in New York City. Hughes published his first poetry book, The Weary Blues, in 1926. Hughes went on to become an established author of novels, poetry, and screenplay. He later died from prostate cancer in New York City, 1967 (age 66). His NYC home has since been designated a landmark by The New York City Preservation Commission.
This project centers around a collection of poems written by Langston Hughes called "Montage of a Dream Deferred." This book-length collection of poems was originally published in 1951. The poems are considered to be written in "jazz style" and focuses on descriptions of Harlem and its mostly African-American inhabitants. This collection was Hughes' first major publication following the end of World War II. The themes of the poems centered around the racial inequality that African-Americans experienced and the many different ways it showed itself.
Our team worked diligently on this project for weeks, originally starting as individuals and soon coming together to make one cohesive representation of our work. We started by us all individually using xml to markup a small section of the document and creating a RelaxNG Schema that matched up with what we wanted to capture. Then we came together as a group and decided which schema best represented what we wanted to include, and we made edits to it to add what the original creator may have missed. We then split the poems among the five of us and we all completed the markup for our sections using the new combined schema.
Once the markup was complete, we had to start working on making the project ready to be displayed on a website. This was done using xslt stylesheets which helped turn the xml into web-ready html, as well as css which provided the display and overall look of the website. We had to make style decisions so that we could choose what look we thought would convey the information best without being too distracting.
