Well, everyone, I was thinking about creating a project that compares two poems of the Harlem Renaissance. More than likely, it would be something by Langston Hughes.
I haven’t thought about the depth of this assignment, but I know that I would probably want to show the poem in TEI (possibly). Hughes uses a lot of repetition, and in order to show the significance, I would also use some of the techniques we learned in class last week and the week prior – ie: the flower, and something with a word count as well.
The reason why I was thinking about a comparison, is because LH used a very different form than, say, Countee Cullen, who wrote using iambic pentameter like Shakespeare.
This also made me think of comparing a Cullen poem with one of Shakespeare’s sonnets instead to see if there are any other similarities other than form.
These are some good initial ideas. You probably want to give some thought to the length of the text(s). Really long texts may be hard to markup in TEI in a few weeks, unless you are only marking up a few features. On the other hand, really short texts may not provide enough data to produce meaningful visualisations.
Lauren, I think your idea is great, because I myself enjoy poems and literature from the Harlem Renaissance as well. Comparing and contrasting two different poets of the time can be interesting. Maybe even a comparison between a Harlem Renaissance writer and somebody of the same era outside of Harlem, with a different style. Professor, most of Langston Hughes poems are 15-20 lines. Are you saying that is too long? What would you say is a good length to take on in the few weeks we have? I am still confused over the content of our project. If we choose to do TEI (which I have been thinking to do as well) is our goal to find different forms and discoveries through distant reading, that we would not have been able to figure out through close reading?
A single Hughes poem would not be a challenge to mark up in TEI, but a series of them might take too long. It’s a matter of balancing the types of things you want to observe with the length of the texts you’ll be dealing with. There are ways to comine XML markup with distant reading. An obvious way is to examine Hughes’ treatment of emotions. You could create a taxomony (set of category labels) of emotions and then tag the vocabulary of the poems with it. Then you could perform visualisations based on the frequencies of emotions. This is similar to the topic flower approach. The trick would be to make sure that you can get enough data to generate the statistics without having to spend day and night tagging the texts. Incidentally, this is a problem for large-scale Digital Humanities projects as well–not just a product of the short period of time we have in the semester.