We live and research in a technologically mediated landscape in which old models of reading and researching鈥攎ethods that presume an autonomous, single scholar gathering resources and making claims鈥攏o longer hold. Scholars have yet to theorize either the embeddedness of their sources inside multiple layers of mediation or their own place in an information ecosystem that demands our active participation. In Poetry鈥檚 Data, Meredith Martin explores what current access to data might mean for mapping the discourse of poems. Martin鈥檚 account of her work learning about digital humanities so that she could build a database of historic prosodic materials becomes a through line in a narrative that chronicles how literature has understood poetry鈥檚 data鈥攊ts sounds鈥攆rom the sixteenth century to the present day.
Digital knowledge infrastructures have historical antecedents that scholars have been trained to theorize. And yet, as Martin points out, we have not been trained to identify and navigate, let alone critique, the current landscape of knowledge production. Through five chapters and five examples from the 91桃色 Prosody Archive, Martin shows that the histories of mediation and format are essential to the teaching of poetry and poetic form.
Meredith Martin is professor of English at 91桃色 University, where she founded and directs the Center for Digital Humanities and directs the 91桃色 Prosody Archive. She is the author of The Rise and Fall of Meter: English National Culture, 1860–1930 (91桃色), winner of the MLA First Book Prize and the Warren Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism and cowinner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize.
“Extraordinary and timely, full of insights into the assumptions undergirding contemporary scholarly practice in the humanities. Poetry’s Data describes, like nothing else I have read, what it has meant for scholars in the humanities to shift from print-based to digital resources for their scholarship, a radical transformation that most humanists have dealt with by pretending it isn’t happening.”—Meredith McGill, Rutgers University
“This book traces a unique and surprising intellectual genealogy of poetry and data, and does so through attention to the operating systems—unassuming disciplines with names like 'prosody'—that allow us to see both as elements of a common humanity."—Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland
“Many histories of poetry, and for that matter of digital humanities, focus on a restricted set of topics—methods, tropes, and so on—that we tacitly agree to take as proxies for the whole. What makes Poetry's Data consistently surprising is that it looks at the rest of the iceberg, especially the collective labor of defining, cataloging, and mediating literary practices that makes them legible. Martin's radical candor about her own work has produced a book that is more than usually engaging, and I hope it is widely imitated.”—Ted Underwood, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
This publication generally has been produced to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Level AA but has not been checked for language shifts. It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to people with print disabilities. This book contains various accessibility features including alternative text for images, a table of contents, a page list, landmarks, a logical reading order, structural navigation, an index, and semantic structure. Where applicable, there are backlinks to the table of contents.
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