Poetry's Data - by Meredith Martin

About the Book

"In this book, Meredith Martin presents a historical account of prosodic criticism and, through the example of her own research path, argues for new scholarly practices in literary studies and the humanities more broadly. Challenging the common scholarly practice of emphasizing one critical narrative, one pathway through history or one author's reading, the book traces three arcs: the effects of the major shift in the late twentieth century from print-based to digital resources in scholarship with the emergence of the World Wide Web; Martin's experience as a scholar who coordinated a digital project about the history of the study of poetry, which led to the creation of the Princeton Prosody Archive and the founding of Princeton's Center for Digital Humanities (CDH); and the mix of computational and aesthetic elements in the study of prosody, including the study of versification and meter, in the broader context of English literary study as a discipline. Across these three arcs, Martin argues that scholars must take seriously the idea of digital media as mediation, through which textual forms are transformed into data and delivered to us via data structures, and that our reading of historical texts in digital forms must reckon with these mediations. She also demonstrates the connection between the intellectual labor of studying prosody-or any historical object-and the intellectual labor of fostering a collaborative research process. "This is a book," she writes, "about the shifting grounds of knowledge production in the digital age, and how we might situate ourselves amid these shifts by returning to, of all things, poetry.""--

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.