Poetry's Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody


Hardcover
- Price:
- $99.95/拢84.00
- ISBN:
- Published:
- Apr 22, 2025
- Copyright:
- 2025
- Pages:
- 224
- Size:
- 6.13 x 9.25 in.
- 36 b/w illus.
Paperback
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ebook (PDF via app)
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.