Clara Martínez Cantón

Plotting Poetry: On mechanically enhanced reading, 5–7 October 2017, Basel, Switzerland

The international conference Plotting Poetry: On Mechanically Enhanced Reading was organised by Anne-Sophie Bories, Hugues Marchal (both University of Basel), and Gérald Purnelle (Liège University) held in Basel, Switzerland from 5 to 7 October 2017. This conference comprised 26 presentations in English and French, delivered by scholars from eleven different countries and devoted to a wide range of projects in which poetry, poetics, and poeticity meet with computers and quantitative models. The conference was opened by keynote speaker Franco Moretti (Stanford Literary Lab). His topic, “Totentanz. Operationalizing Aby Warburg’s Pathosformeln”, focused on visual arts, and the speaker presented their achievements in a collaborative research with Leo Impett (EPFL) aiming to build a well-defined model of the German art historian Aby Warburg’s key concept “pathos formula”. The authors proposed to model the body expression of pathos by measuring the sizes of 11 angles formed by the spine and the thighs, shins, shoulders, arms, forearms, and head of the central figures found in the Warburg’s “picture atlas” Mnemosyne – a series of thematically organised panels with nearly 1,000 photographs of paintings, sculptures, book pages, stamps, tarot cards and other types of images. Processing these multidimensional data by means of principal component analysis and cluster analysis has shown that they are able to identify not only the prototypical expression found in some motifs (“nymphs” × “non-nymphs”) but also the pathos expression of human body in general. The second keynote of the conference, Valérie Beaudouin (Télécom ParisTech) presented the methods and results of metrical analysis of hexameter in classical French drama and 19th century French poetry. The corpus analysed consists of ca. 120,000 verses. The three possible strategies of the overviewed computer-assisted analysis are parsing the graphic chain, using machine learning techniques, or the syntactic analysis of the verses and their phonetic transcription. The software Metrometre developed by the speaker could identify metrical syllables, metrical vowels, ends of words, parts of speech and stresses, allowing the representation of the alexandrine patterns: the frequency and occurrences of the schwa, the distribution of ends of words or stresses along the verse-lines. The chronological representation of the data Studia Metrica et Poetica 4.2, 2017, 126–137

EVI-LINHD, a virtual research environment for the Spanish-speaking community

Laboratorio de Innovacion en Humanidades Digitales (UNED) has developed Entorno Virtual de Investigacion del Laboratorio de Innovacion en Humanidades Digitales (EVI-LINHD), the first virtual research environment devoted mainly to Spanish speakers interested in digital scholarly edition. EVI-LINHD combines different open-source software for developing a complete digital project: (1) a Webbased application markup tool—TEIscribe—combined with an eXistdb solution and a TEIPublisher platform, (2) Omeka for digital libraries, and (3) WordPress for simple Web pages. All these instances are linked to a local installation of the LINDAT/Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) digital repository. LINDAT/CLARIN allows EVI-LINHD users to have their projects deposited and stored safely. Thanks to this solution, EVI-LINHD projects also improve their visibility. The specific metadata profile used in the repository is based on Dublin Core, and it is enriched with the Spanish translation of DARIAH’s Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities.

Enjambment Detection in a Large Diachronic Corpus of Spanish Sonnets

Enjambment takes place when a syntactic unit is broken up across two lines of poetry, giving rise to different stylistic effects. In Spanish literary studies, there are unclear points about the types of stylistic effects that can arise, and under which linguistic conditions. To systematically gather evidence about this, we developed a system to automatically identify enjambment (and its type) in Spanish. For evaluation, we manually annotated a reference corpus covering different periods. As a scholarly corpus to apply the tool, from public HTML sources we created a diachronic corpus covering four centuries of sonnets (3750 poems), and we analyzed the occurrence of enjambment across stanzaic boundaries in different periods. Besides, we found examples that highlight limitations in current definitions of enjambment.