No source: created in electronic format.
What would it mean to turn a class of undergraduates – one of the most important emerging digital humanities communities – loose on a text analysis puzzle unintentionally created by England’s poet laureate? This poster presentation will report on the process, outcomes, successes, and failures of an original research project for those just learning about the possibilities of humanities computing.
Carol Ann Duffy was named the poet laureate of Britain in May 2009, the first Scot,
woman, and openly gay person to hold this position. While this choice signaled a
desire for diversity and inclusiveness on the part of the crown, the most
important criterion for her selection was her poetry itself. Tackling
traditional themes of love along with less conventional ones such as sport, what
most sets apart Duffy’s poetry from many of her contemporaries is its style,
which, on the occasion of her appointment, Sarah Lyall in The
New York Times described as ‘deceptively simple’ and which ‘produce[s]
accessible, often mischievous poems dealing with the darkest turmoil and the
lightest minutiae of everyday life’ (Lyall 2009).
Perhaps Duffy’s style is best exemplified by her 1999 volume, The
World’s Wife, in which she presents short dramatic monologues from the
women married to famous men throughout history, mythology, and literature. She
presents the stories of ‘Mrs. Darwin’, ‘Mrs. Sisyphus’, and ‘Mrs. Quasimodo’,
among others. Clever, humorous, and filled with poems that even rhyme, The World’s Wife sold tremendously well and began to be
used regularly in classrooms. Yet critics felt that the collection was of
substantially different quality when compared to her three previous,
prize-winning collections. As Jeanette Winterson reported in a profile on Duffy,
The World’s Wife prompted reactions that had critics
‘ask[ing] questions about whether Duffy had lost her balance. Had she stopped
writing poetry and slipped into verse?’ (Winterson).
While Duffy did not comment publicly on such evaluations of her work, undergraduate
students in my Spring 2009 poetry class discovered evidence that she was aware
of a difference between The World’s Wife and those
volumes that had preceded it. While exploring her recently acquired papers (http://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/duffy834/) in Emory
University’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL), the students
found an undated letter from Duffy to the publisher of her previous volumes. She
writes that she will be publishing The World’s Wife with
another press: ‘...this book is not a “normal” poetry collection by me – it’s
closer to popular entertainment, if you like’ (Duffy). So while Duffy later told
Winterson that the question of perceived differences in her volumes doesn’t
concern her (Winterson), her letter makes it clear that she perceives real
differences prior to the publication of The World’s
Wife.
This discovery by my students in a 2009 became the seed for the capstone project in
my current course, ‘Introduction to Digital Humanities’ (http://www.briancroxall.net/dh): we are testing Duffy’s own words to
see whether The World’s Wife truly does differ from her ‘“normal” poetry collection[s].’ To this end, we
are reading The World’s Wife alongside her previous
volume, Mean Time (1993), which won both the prestigious
Forward Poetry Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award. Initially, students wrote
essays that employed close reading to make an argument about whether or not
there are differences between the two volumes. The class then turned to less
traditional modes of analysis. Each student was assigned a number of poems from
each volume to transcribe, preparatory for analysis in the suite of Voyant (http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur), formerly Voyeur (Rockwell 2011),
designed by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell. Students used different
facets of Voyant to explore possible shifts in Duffy’s language between the two
texts: word frequency, the number of unique words, word collocation, and more.
With other tools, we tested the relative line lengths between the volumes and
the readability scores of Duffy’s language. Students worked in teams on the
different modules to understand and interpret their results. The class also
turned to the archives and Duffy’s notebooks to determine (anecdotally) the rate
of changes and corrections between particular poems in the different volumes.
Finally, inspired by Stephen Ramsay’s arguments that ‘Digital Humanities is
about building things’ and Mark Sample’s suggestion that digital humanities is
‘about sharing’, the students built interpretive arguments about their findings
and shared them via the course website.
As mentioned, this poster reports on the processes of designing a digital humanities research project, the process of making those findings public, and the exposure of undergraduates to some of the basic tools and methods of textual analysis. It incorporates not only the results of textual analysis, but also feedback from students about their experience learning new tools and approaches, including a strong emphasis on collaboration – a rarity in most humanities coursework. The presentation continues the trend to discuss the intersection of pedagogy and digital humanities; multiple panels on this subject are being convened at the 2012 Modern Language Convention, for example, and the 2011 Digital Humanities conference at Stanford featured posters by Katherine D. Harris and Beth Bonsignore et al. on the subject (Croxall & Berens 2011; Harris 2011a, 2011b; Bonsignore 2011). This presentation in particular builds on Harris’s work on the necessity of uncertainty when designing opportunities for ‘ play ’ by presenting students with a research assignment in which the outcomes are not yet predetermined by the instructor (Harris 2011b).
While reporting on original text analysis research, this presentation simultaneously examines how undergraduates and pedagogy are important facets of the increasingly diverse community of practice that is digital humanities.
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