Poetry's Data

"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.""--