EBOOK
About
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. "Extraordinary and timely, full of insights into the assumptions undergirding contemporary scholarly practice in the humanities. Poetry's Data describes, like nothing else I have read, what it has meant for scholars in the humanities to shift from print-based to digital resources for their scholarship, a radical transformation that most humanists have dealt with by pretending it isn't happening."-Meredith McGill, Rutgers University
"This book traces a unique and surprising intellectual genealogy of poetry and data, and does so through attention to the operating systems-unassuming disciplines with names like 'prosody'-that allow us to see both as elements of a common humanity."-Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland
"Many histories of poetry, and for that matter of digital humanities, focus on a restricted set of topics-methods, tropes, and so on-that we tacitly agree to take as proxies for the whole. What makes Poetry's Data consistently surprising is that it looks at the rest of the iceberg, especially the collective labor of defining, cataloging, and mediating literary practices that makes them legible. Martin's radical candor about her own work has produced a book that is more than usually engaging, and I hope it is widely imitated."-Ted Underwood, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign "[Poetry's Data] presents a compelling case on why we should critically examine in the digital age the way in which we read, quantify, interpret, and historicise poetry. . . . The book offers a wide-scale analysis of the Princeton Prosody Archives. It offers digital humanists a critical investigation into the conceptual understanding of poetry and poetry's (meta)data, which are, perhaps today even more than ever before, shaped by systems and infrastructures."---Dorka Tamás, The British Society for Literature and Science
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. "Extraordinary and timely, full of insights into the assumptions undergirding contemporary scholarly practice in the humanities. Poetry's Data describes, like nothing else I have read, what it has meant for scholars in the humanities to shift from print-based to digital resources for their scholarship, a radical transformation that most humanists have dealt with by pretending it isn't happening."-Meredith McGill, Rutgers University
"This book traces a unique and surprising intellectual genealogy of poetry and data, and does so through attention to the operating systems-unassuming disciplines with names like 'prosody'-that allow us to see both as elements of a common humanity."-Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland
"Many histories of poetry, and for that matter of digital humanities, focus on a restricted set of topics-methods, tropes, and so on-that we tacitly agree to take as proxies for the whole. What makes Poetry's Data consistently surprising is that it looks at the rest of the iceberg, especially the collective labor of defining, cataloging, and mediating literary practices that makes them legible. Martin's radical candor about her own work has produced a book that is more than usually engaging, and I hope it is widely imitated."-Ted Underwood, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign "[Poetry's Data] presents a compelling case on why we should critically examine in the digital age the way in which we read, quantify, interpret, and historicise poetry. . . . The book offers a wide-scale analysis of the Princeton Prosody Archives. It offers digital humanists a critical investigation into the conceptual understanding of poetry and poetry's (meta)data, which are, perhaps today even more than ever before, shaped by systems and infrastructures."---Dorka Tamás, The British Society for Literature and Science