[Corpora-List] Poetry

[Ken Litkowski]

I don't think the situation in analyzing poetry is quite so dire.  The 
field of content analysis has been applied quite well to poetry.  I have 
been the purveyor of Minnesota Contextual Content Analysis (MCCA), 
developed in the 70s.  MCCA has been applied to many genres and its 
primary developer (Don McTavish) analyzed a festschrift in honor of 
Pablo Neruda, where many authors wrote in imitation.  MCCA was able to 
separate out the imitators.  MCCA (for which I have a demo using Hamlet 
as a sample text) can do quite a lot in categorizing styles.

I believe also that Nancy Ide performed a spectral analysis of Blake's 
"Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright".

Alexander Osherenko wrote:

 >> 1. attributing any given poem to a particular style is likely to
 >> be  highly subjective, and controversial among scholars of poetry
 >>
 > It doesn't matter much. The category doesn't have to be objective,
 > it must only be in some way comprehensible for a human.
 >
 >
 >> 2. what taxonomy of types of 'poetic style' would anyone use? Are
 >> there  agreed types and terms?
 >>
 > I see, but there is always some way that is usually specified as a
 > particular trend in poetry and real experts can always determine
 > immediately the literary trend or even the poet.
 >
 >
 >> 3. what level of granularity of categorisation should be used? Are
 >>  there  sub-types ("late romantic")? Is there a hierarchy that
 >> can encompass  all types and sub-types? How many levels does it
 >> need to have?
 >>
 > It would be very nice if I had such information since I can always
 > throw away the unnecessary information and leave information I
 > need. In your example, I assume you can always consider "late
 > romantic" as simply "romantic". Such transition ("romantic" to
 > "late romantic") is probably not possible because you would need
 > some additional information e.g. about the authoring time.
 >
 >
 >> 4. what do you do with poems that fit into more than one style, or
 >>  are  at a boundary between styles?
 >>
 > If there is more than one similar poems of this kind, I can define a
 >  special mixed category or if it is not appropriate must decide for
 >  a particular category loosing some information. Otherwise I don't
 > study this poem in my corpus.
 >
 >
 >> 5. do the categories fit for poetry from different languages,
 >> countries  or traditions, and for translations?
 >>
 > For the sake of simplicity I work only with one language. Of course,
 >  I can also use translations as long as a particular translator
 > uses words and phrases of the destination language that are
 > sufficient to understand the style of the poem.
 >
 >
 >> Now, it may be that these problems can be raised with any form of 
categorisation.
 >>  The way to address these sorts of problems is to find  measures
 >> which are consistent, transparent and as objective as possible.
 >>
 > No. They simply have to be consistent.
 >
 >
 >> I'd be very interested to know more about why you want this
 >> though.  There may be other ways to approach your research
 >> question.
 >>
 > I could imagine you would be rather disappointed. It is surely a
 > "sacrileg" and I don't want to be cynical but I want to test my
 > approach to opinion mining (emotion mining) for categorizing poems.
 >
 > Best wishes
 >
 > Alexander
 >
 >
 >> Best wishes, Martin
 >>
 >> Alexander Osherenko wrote:
 >>
 >>> It's probably an incorrect word 'annotation'. Actually it's
 >>> important to
 >>>
 >> know that a particular poem is said to be a representative of a
 >> particular style. It is not enough to assume that the poems of a
 >> particular author are all of some style since humans and also
 >> poets do change their authoring style during the life.
 >>
 >>> -------- Original-Nachricht -------- Datum: Mon, 09 Oct 2006
 >>> 10:11:17 +0100 Von: Martin Wynne <martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk> An:
 >>>  Alexander Osherenko <osherenko at gmx.de> Betreff: Re:
 >>> [Corpora-List] Poetry
 >>>
 >>>
 >>>> What do you mean by annotation?
 >>>>
 >>>> Alexander Osherenko wrote:
 >>>>
 >>>>> Hello!
 >>>>>
 >>>>> Has anybody seen or maybe heard of an annotated poetry
 >>>>> corpus? For
 >>>>>
 >>>> example, poem text and its annotation (romantic whatsoever).
 >>>> The
 >>>>
 >> Gutenberg
 >>
 >>>> project is very interesting, but unfortunately without
 >>>> annotations.
 >>>>
 >>>>> Best poetic wishes
 >>>>>
 >>>>> Alexander
 >>>>>
 >>>> --  Martin Wynne Head of the Oxford Text Archive and AHDS
 >>>> Literature, Languages and Linguistics
 >>>>
 >>>> Oxford University Computing Services 13 Banbury Road Oxford UK
 >>>>  - OX2 6NN Tel: +44 1865 283299 Fax: +44 1865 273275 
martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk
 >>>>

 >>>>
 >>
 >> --  Martin Wynne Head of the Oxford Text Archive and AHDS
 >> Literature, Languages and Linguistics
 >>
 >> Oxford University Computing Services 13 Banbury Road Oxford UK -
 >> OX2 6NN Tel: +44 1865 283299 Fax: +44 1865 273275 
martin.wynne at oucs.ox.ac.uk
 >>

 >>
 >


-- 
Ken Litkowski                     TEL.: 301-482-0237
CL Research                       EMAIL: ken at clres.com
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