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

Why literary studies must confront digital mediation

We live and research in a technologically mediated landscape in which old models of reading and researching--methods that presume an autonomous, single scholar gathering resources and making claims--no 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’s Data, Meredith Martin explores what current access to data might mean for mapping the discourse of poems. Martin’s 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’s data--its sounds--from 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 Princeton 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 Princeton University, where she founded and directs the Center for Digital Humanities and directs the Princeton Prosody Archive. She is the author of The Rise and Fall of Meter: English National Culture 1860-1930 (Princeton), winner of the MLA First Book Prize and the Warren Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism and cowinner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize.