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@oucs.ox.ac.uk> An:
>>> Alexander Osherenko <osherenko@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@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@oucs.ox.ac.uk
>>
>>
>
-- Ken Litkowski TEL.: 301-482-0237 CL Research EMAIL: ken@clres.com 9208 Gue Road Damascus, MD 20872-1025 USA Home Page: http://www.clres.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 09 2006 - 20:26:14 MET DST