Washington University

Title of Study/Project:

      We don't have a formal title for this work.  Our purposes in working with SEASR are to evaluate the SEASR platform and approach, and to begin what is sure to be a long process of building experience and infrastructure with projects outlined in section 3 below.

List of team members and their affiliation

• Steve Pentecost (Humanities Digital Workshop, Washington University in St. Louis)

Procedural Outline of Study/Project

We have a number of relatively small, proof of concept exercises pending:

• The editors for the upcoming Spenser edition would like to be able to identify hypermetric lines, since they may be sites of inter-editional variants.  Is it possible to automatically scan lines of verse, and to identify hypermetric lines?  We're working this question outside of SEASR, but will probably pull our components into SEASR for later use.
• Last semester, one of our students noticed that a handful of words which appear Spenser's poems from A Theatre for Voluptous Worldlngs also turn up in a passage of FQ.  How many other passages in FQ similarly echo-at least at the level of diction-A Theatre (and Spenser's other shorted works)?
• We know that Spenser participates in a complex chain of literary transmission/translation/re-interpretation (limiting our scope to A Theatre and Complaints, and to its predecessors).  What's the best way to identify and represent the threads of "inheritance" from text to text?
• A WU professor of German theorizes that as a consumer economy emerges in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, German novels become more and more occupied by mentions of the artifacts of material culture.  Can we calculate a "materiality quotient" for a work? We think this is an exercise in building an ad hoc taxonomy of words, then measuring the frequency of words on the taxonomy across a corpus.

Activity Timeline or Milestones

We don't have a hard-and-fast timeline for much of this work, since it's largely being done on speculation.

Ideas on what your team needs from SEASR staff to help you acheive your goal.

We're good to go for now.  If anything comes up, we'll post across the jira site.  Thanks!