Jun 10, 2019 Digital Humanities Highlight: Poemage

Project: Poemage

Discipline: School of Computing & Department of English

Katharine Coles, Distinguished Professor, Department of English

Julie Gonnering Lein, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English

Nina McCurdy, Doctoral Student, School of Computing

Miriah Meyer, Associate Professor, School of Computing

What is Poemage?

This post is part of a series highlighting current digital scholarship projects at the University of Utah. Today we are looking at Poemage, a visualization system for examining poetry created by researchers in the School of Computing and Department of English.

Excerpted from their publication Poemage: Visualizing the Sonic Topology of a Poem:

The true value of computation to close reading is still very much an open question. During a two-year design study, we explored this question with several poetry scholars, focusing on an investigation of sound and linguistic devices in poetry. The contributions of our design study include a problem characterization and data abstraction of the use of sound in poetry as well as Poemage, a visualization tool for interactively exploring the sonic topology of a poem.

The Poemage interface comprises three linked views: (left) the set view allows users to browse sets of words linked through sonic and linguistic resemblances; (middle) the poem view allows users to explore sonically linked words directly via the text; (right) the path view shows the sonic topology of a poem.

The visualizations could contribute to discussions regarding concrete or synesthetic’ poetry, which deliberately engage cross-modal perception [5, 31]; regarding reading and writing about text and image and about alphabetic signs as a basic digital technology that operates, already, on visual and aural/oral registers [5, 29]; or regarding how electronic digital (re)mediation further complicates semiotic and phenomenological questions through coding languages, hardware, and interface [38, 28, 22, 31]; etc

Axon: Creative Explorations

The issue, Axon Capsule 1: Poetry on the Move, 2015, highlighted Katharine Coles and her demonstration of Poemage as Poet-in-Residence at Poetry on the Move Festival 2015. In the article, Professor Coles poses questions the Poemage team set out to resolve, challenges presented and narrates the evolution of these questions and problems that resulted in the tool Poemage. She demonstrates the poetic elements Poemage analyzes and then visualizes through selected works of Louise Bogan, Emily Dickinson, Celia Zukofsky, and William Carlos Williams.

For the full article describing the design and application of Poemage see:

N. McCurdy, J. Lein, K. Coles, M. Meyer. Poemage: Visualizing the Sonic Topology of a Poem. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proceedings of InfoVis 2015), pages 439-448, January 2016

How to access it?

You can download the open source Poemage software at their website, which includes some technical information. After downloading the software be sure to read the “README.txt” text file. The software comes with a set of poems pre-loaded into the software for analysis. Users who have downloaded the software can load any poems of their choosing into the tool.