PoetryVisualizationTool

All the documents described in this essay are available here: http://www.4shared.com/file/213276484/156f569f/sampleCoding.html

Synopsis

In collaboration with Digital Artist Ira Greenberg, I am building a Poetry Visualization Tool (http://unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess/vmodel/vmodel.html). He is building the visualizations in the Processing language; I am encoding the poetry to be visualized in an xml code that is an extension of TEI, with "pa" (Poetess Archive, http://unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess) elements added into it. What I offer to the TEI membership is not the processing code but the extended TEI and its schema that can be used to code the meter, sound, tropology, and syntax of poetry.

The extended tag set and its schema are available here: http://www.4shared.com/file/213276484/156f569f/sampleCoding.htm In this folder, you will find four extended-TEI documents coding one poem: one encodes its meter (see meterOde.xml), one its syntax (syntaxOde.xml), one its literary figures (tropologyOde.xml), and one its sound (soundOde.xml). The schema, PAViz.rnc, contains all the added elements and attributes. The tagset is derived from traditional terms for literary analysis and scansion. The syntax draws on linguistic analyses, but it simplifies, abstracts, and focuses on aspects of the syntax in which literary critics are most often interested. XSLTs are included that in my view reveal how versatile xml documents can be in “deformative reading”: manipulating texts to better reveal their deep structures.

Since the schema can validate all four versions, you may ask, why bother making four documents? Answer: Overlapping hierarchies. Standoff markup would be a better solution than encoding four versions, and so I look forward to the development of Peter Shillingsburg's CaTT tool (http://www.ctsdh.luc.edu).

I would love to know of other similar developments so that I may bring my work into sync with them, and of course please report any errors (mandellc@muohio.edu).

Features

This is simply an extended tagset for analyzing poetry, at the moment, though the tag set can be used by a visualization tool in development at http://www.iragreenberg.com/ira_greenberg_data/code/poetess/index.html

User commentary

Please sign all comments.

System requirements

The Poetry Visualization tool can be run on Mac, Windows, or Linux. Eventually, I hope to make it available online as a service in which properly coded poems can be loaded. Until then, one will have to download the Processing application at http://www.processing.org in order to see the visualizations. Again, I'm putting up on this wiki not the visualizations themselves and the processing code, but only the TEI used to encode the poetry that will participate.

Source code and licensing

Source Code consists basically in an extended tei schema (PAViz.rnc) and four sample coded versions of John Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn (meterOde.xml, tropologyOde.xml, soundOde.xml, and syntaxOde.xml). All of these documents including documentation are available in the folder called sampleCoding available at:

http://www.4shared.com/file/213276484/156f569f/sampleCoding.html

This is a pre-release version of things, and I welcome comments.

The finished tool will have a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Support for TEI

Any poem coded in TEI can be coded in this way. Simply open your TEI document, change the schema to the schema provided, PAViz.rnc, and then make use of the elements you find described in the instruction document and in the teiHeaders of the four sample versions of Keats's Ode.

Language(s)

(What computer language is the tool written in? -- Processing (What language(s) are used in the interface?) -- no inteface yet (What language(s) are used in the documentation?) -- MSW

Documentation

See "Coding Poetry for the Poetess Archive" in the sampleCoding file available at 4Shared: http://www.4shared.com/file/213276484/156f569f/sampleCoding.html

When released, the tool will be announced here: http://unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess/vmodel/vmodel.html

Tech support

(What technical support is provided by the creators of the tool?) Email me at mandellc@muohio.edu

User community

(Are there any communities of users?)

Sample implementations

My favorite: http://iragreenberg.com/poetess/viz04/ (use a Safari browser)

Current version number and date of release

none yet

History of versions

none yet

How to download or buy

only TEI extensions available at the moment