Poetry’s Data

What do we learn about poems when we read them through how they were taught and understood in the past? How can this knowledge help us think differently about what information poems give us as aesthetic and historical objects, and about the status of "poetry" in culture? Focusing on works in the Princeton Prosody Archive, this talk will explore what it means to put the information we often take for granted as defining what poems are and how they mean (their data: meter, rhyme, figurative language) next to their metadata (how these things were described and discussed, and how the poems were classified, circulated, canonized, found, and lost). 

Meredith Martin is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University, where she is also the Director of the Center for Digital Humanities and the Director of its flagship project, the Princeton Prosody Archive.