Tackling the Toolkit: Plotting Poetry through Computational Literary Studies (original) (raw)
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A computational analysis of poetic style
Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, 2015
How do standards of poetic beauty change as a function of time and expertise? Here we use computational methods to compare the stylistic features of 359 English poems written by 19th century professional poets, Imagist poets, contemporary professional poets, and contemporary amateur poets. Building upon techniques designed to analyze style and sentiment in texts, we examine elements of poetic craft such as imagery, sound devices, emotive language, and diction. We find that contemporary professional poets use significantly more concrete words than 19th century poets, fewer emotional words, and more complex sound devices. These changes are consistent with the tenets of Imagism, an early 20thcentury literary movement. Further analyses show that contemporary amateur poems resemble 19th century professional poems more than contemporary professional poems on several dimensions. The stylistic similarities between contemporary amateur poems and 19th century professional poems suggest that e...
Quantitative Analysis of Poetic Texts
Quantitative Analysis of Poetic Texts, 2015
The book presents itself as a contribution to the study of language and text, with a clear emphasis on text. As is obvious from its title, it focuses exclusively on poetic texts; in particular, it analyses a corpus of 150 Romanian poems (not all of them serve as research material for all questions asked) written by Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889). In the Introduction, a short discussion on the aim and methodology of text studies is presented. With respect to the methodology, the authors explain advantages of quantitative methods. They also provide refutations of some (still relatively common) objections against the use of the mathematical modelling and statistical testing in linguistic research. There are infinitely many aspects of texts (and other objects of research as well). Even within a restricted research area there are many possible points of view, which highlight different unsolved problems, lead to different approaches, require applications of different methods, reveal new interrelations, etc. Therefore, a choice must be made what to investigate and where to start. The choice of the authors, who limit themselves to two (broadly defined) aspects of the poetic texts, is reflected in the structure of the book. It consists of four chapters; in addition to the Introduction there are Phonic phenomena, The word, and The control cycle. The second and the third chapter are divided into several sections and subsequently into subsections. The chapter on Phonic phenomena contains five sections. The first of them, Occurrence without pattern, begins with an exposition of the Romanian phonemic system. Then it deals with a phonemic transcription of Romanian written texts, where the approach from Altmann and Fengxiang (2008) is followed. Ranked frequencies of phonemes in one particular poem are modelled; not, however, in the text considered as a whole, but in each of its four strophes separately. It is shown that phoneme frequencies, and also ranks of particular phonemes, differ among individual strophes. Attention is paid also to euphony in verses, which is in this book defined as a significantly frequent (i.e. higher than random) occurrence of a phoneme in a verse. The phenomenon is
2013
We present SPARSAR, a system for the automatic analysis of poetry(and text) style which makes use of NLP tools like tokenizers, sentence splitters, NER (Name Entity Recognition) tools, and taggers. Our system in addition to the tools listed above which aim at obtaining the same results of quantitative linguistics, adds a number of additional tools for syntactic and semantic structural analysis and prosodic modeling. We use a constituency parser to measure the structure of modifiers in NPs; and a dependency mapping of the previous parse to analyse the verbal complex and determine Polarity and Factuality. Another important component of the system is a phonological parser to account for OOVWs, in the process of grapheme to phoneme conversion of the poem. We also measure the prosody of the poem by associating mean durational values in msecs to each syllable from a database and created an algorithm to account for the evaluation of durational values for any possible syllable structure. Ev...
2017
The most important development in modern and postmodern poetry is the replacement of traditional meter by new rhythmical patterns. Ever since Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), modern (nineteenthto twenty-first-century) poets have been searching for novel forms of prosody, accent, rhythm, and intonation. Along with the rejection of older metrical units such as the iamb or trochee, a structure of lyrical language was developed that renounced traditional forms like rhyme and meter. This development is subsumed under the term free verse prosody. Our project will test this theory by applying machine learning or deep learning techniques to a corpus of modern and postmodern poems as read aloud by the original authors. To this end, we examine “lyrikline”, the most famous online portal for spoken poetry. First, about 17 different patterns being characteristic for the lyrikline-poems have been identified by the philological scholar of this project. This identification was based on a ...
An overview of past and current poetical practice and what they might mean in the 21st century to the manner or means of poetry performance and expression given social media interactions and platforms. Rarely does someone ask "What is poetry?", "What is a poet?" and "What purpose does it serve?", hence we live in the perpetual certainty of pleasure and pain!