Plotting Poetry
On Mechanically-Enhanced Reading
Scholars today are experimenting with a vast array of reading devices in order to explore texts anew, often blending, both on the technical and on the hermeneutical axes, traditional approaches and innovative computing tools, that collect textual features and detect trends not visible to a human eye as they exceed the span of our focus.
Our understanding of poetry is not left untouched by the revolution that computational analysis is bringing to the humanities.
Because of its intrinsic link to ver...
Note de l’éditeur
Publié avec l’aide financière de l’université de Bâle
Éditeur : Presses universitaires de Liège
Lieu d’édition : Liège
Publication sur OpenEdition Books : 26 novembre 2025
ISBN numérique : 978-2-87562-500-7
DOI : 10.4000/157y8
Collection : Littératures | 7
Année d’édition : 2021
ISBN (Édition imprimée) : 978-2-87562-280-8
Nombre de pages : 160
Anne-Sophie Bories
IntroductionValérie Beaudouin
The Machine in the Garden of Meter and RhythmElise Thorsen et David J. Birnbaum
Exploring Inexact Rhyme in Russian VerseNatalie M. Houston
Exploring the Idiom of Victorian Rhyme Through Applied Historical PoeticsPeter Verhaar
Opening new patterns from new disorders: A Computational Analysis of the Poetry of Louis MacNeiceÉliane Delente et Richard Renault
Projet Anamètre : présentation, limites et avancéesClara Martínez Cantón, Pablo Ruiz Fabo, Elena González-Blanco et al.
Automatic Enjambment Detection as a New Source of Evidence in Spanish VersificationIsabelle Parkinson
A Poetics Defined in the ParatextMuriel Louâpre et Hugues Marchal
Modelling and Visualizing the Evolution of 19th Century French Scientific PoetryChristophe Imperiali
Structures du vers ditScholars today are experimenting with a vast array of reading devices in order to explore texts anew, often blending, both on the technical and on the hermeneutical axes, traditional approaches and innovative computing tools, that collect textual features and detect trends not visible to a human eye as they exceed the span of our focus.
Our understanding of poetry is not left untouched by the revolution that computational analysis is bringing to the humanities.
Because of its intrinsic link to verse, poetry has been a very early object of statistical studies. Any careful examination of metres, rhymes, or caesuras is bound to generate large datasets, calling for the borrowing of methods from the exact sciences. Indeed, attempts at a mathematical evaluation of poetic styles largely predate the use of computers, and the methodological turn towards the use of new technologies has been generally well-received within the academic community. Still, is the mechanically enhanced, “nonhuman” reading of poems fruitful, or even legitimate? Must the literary scholar, whose object is a fundamentally “human” material, meet the burden of proof and possibly cast away intuitions? Conversely, can calculations account for the subtlety of our poetic experience? Is poeticity, in other words, to be found in the measurable sum of artfully assembled processes, or does it escape all normalisation efforts?
Stemming from the group Plotting Poetry, a community of scholars of different language areas, working on different time periods and poetical genres, who have come together to share their findings and methods, this volume presents a rich sample of research endeavours in the field. It illustrates how a mechanically-enhanced reading can be put to the test, serve to pursue traditional hermeneutical questions, challenge certain assumptions about forms, reveal unsuspected thematic patterns, feed the approach of the literary historian, or open up new, unthought-of paths for our questionings. It is aimed both at specialists of either poetry or digital humanities, and at a broader readership curious to learn about computational approaches to poetry studies.
Anne-Sophie Bories (dir.)
Group leader in French literature at the University of Basel and founder of the group Plotting Poetry.
Hugues Marchal (dir.)
Professor of modern French and general literature at the University of Basel and honorary member of the Institut universitaire de France.
Gérald Purnelle (dir.)
Professor at the University of Liège, where he teaches French-language poetry, applied statistics, metrics and the history of poetic forms.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Wilderness et Western
L’Ouest fictionnel chez Gustave Aimard et Emilio Salgari
Luca Di Gregorio
2014
Glorieuses modernistes
Art, écriture et modernité au féminin
Mary Ann Caws et Anne Reynes-Delobel
2015
Questions de possibilité
Poésie contemporaine et forme poétique
David Caplan Stéphane Bouquet et Gérald Purnelle (trad.)
2016
El personaje transficcional en el mundo hispánico
Álvaro Ceballos Viro et Jéromine François (dir.)
2018
El libro y la vida
Ensayos críticos sobre la obra de Héctor Abad Faciolince
Catalina Quesada et Kristine Vanden Berghe (dir.)
2019
Imaginaire de l’insolite et problématique identitaire dans les lettres belges francophones : un nouveau fantastique ?
Baccary Sarr
2021
Tradición y transgresión
Ensayos críticos sobre la obra de Guadalupe Nettel
Nicolas Licata, Yanna Hadatty Mora et Kristine Vanden Berghe (dir.)
2023
Contre la poésie, la poésie
Du dissensus en poésie moderne et contemporaine
Lénaïg Cariou et Stéphane Cunescu (dir.)
2024
