Plotting Poetry

Scholars today are experimenting with a vast array of reading devices in order
to explore texts anew, often blending, both on the technical and on the
hermeneutical axes, traditional approaches and innovative computing tools,
that collect textual features and detect trends not visible to a human eye as
they exceed the span of our focus.

Our understanding of poetry is not left untouched by the revolution that
computational analysis is bringing to the humanities.

Because of its intrinsic link to verse, poetry has been a very early object of
statistical studies. Any careful examination of metres, rhymes, or caesuras is
bound to generate large datasets, calling for the borrowing of methods from
the exact sciences. Indeed, attempts at a mathematical evaluation of poetic
styles largely predate the use of computers, and the methodological turn
towards the use of new technologies has been generally well-received within
the academic community. Still, is the mechanically enhanced, "nonhuman"
reading of poems fruitful, or even legitimate? Must the literary scholar,
whose object is a fundamentally “human” material, meet the burden of proof and
possibly cast away intuitions? Conversely, can calculations account for the
subtlety of our poetic experience? Is poeticity, in other words, to be found
in the measurable sum of artfully assembled processes, or does it escape all
normalisation efforts?

Stemming from the group Plotting Poetry, a community of scholars of different
language areas, working on different time periods and poetical genres, who
have come together to share their findings and methods, this volume presents a
rich sample of research endeavours in the field. It illustrates how a
mechanically-enhanced reading can be put to the test, serve to pursue
traditional hermeneutical questions, challenge certain assumptions about
forms, reveal unsuspected thematic patterns, feed the approach of the literary
historian, or open up new, unthought-of paths for our questionings. It is
aimed both at specialists of either poetry or digital humanities, and at a
broader readership curious to learn about computational approaches to poetry
studies.