This dissertation explores how digital methods reveal ways in which soundscapes and landscapes function in William Wordsworth’s complete poetical works, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and Charlotte Smith’s collected poetry. My agenda for this project is two-fold. My first objective is to engage in a meaningful discussion of sound and space in Romantic-era poetry. My second objective is to provide a practical model for digital methods in Romanticism. By using these digital methods, this project 1) generates several visual models, such as word clouds and maps, to explore sound and space in poetry, and 2) creates an alternative way to present literary research. These visualizations are intended to catalyze my larger discussion of sound and space in the Romantic Period and also reinforce my corollary argument that digital methodologies are necessary tools for the humanities.
To explore this topic, my dissertation works with a larger corpus than traditionally expected, which allows me to garner a broader sense of sound in the field. I investigate sound’s relationship to space in these poets’ works and how digital methods can help reinforce, refute, or make discoveries in Romantic poetry. This process is what I term as “middle-reading,” which balances close and distant reading methods for reading large literary corpora. Middle-reading unifies the objectives of close and distant reading methods to be legible to two different audiences, those who perform traditional literary scholarship and those who experiment with digital technologies and try to redefine the field.
My dissertation project is part of a larger academic movement to re-imagine dissertations in the humanities. This dissertation and its corresponding website document an English Literature Ph.D. Candidate’s journey carrying out the “next generation” of Ph.D. This dissertation isn’t just a compilation of five chapters—it is accompanied by a blog-style website and Github repository where much of my labor and time was spent. For the sake of transparency, I made all of my digital methods, corpus materials, and resources available through blogging on my website, writing explanatory footnotes, and building an appendix that showcases my code and data. Just as my methodology of middle-reading requires the reader to re-evaluate how they read, my dissertation challenges both myself, my committee, and readers to reconsider what it means to write a humanities dissertation
This website is an extension of my dissertation on sound, space, and DH methods in the Romantic period. My project considers how digital tools, such as text-mining, topic-modeling, and mapping, help illuminate and visualize abstract concepts, such as sound and nationalism in the poetic works of Wordsworth, Byron, and Smith. I employ what I’ve termed “middle-reading” where I combine traditional close reading analyses with digital tools to further enrich my topic. In this sense, my project goal is twofold:
- I am interested in creating a dissertation that uses digital tools in literary studies to show how they can unveil new insights and alternative paths for approaching my topic. And, more importantly—for me, at least—I will make all my labor transparent so that other scholars could emulate what I’ve done in their own projects (basically making this dissertation a keystone for future literary scholars, much like Amanda Visconti has done with her own dissertation);
- Secondly, I aim to better understand how soundscapes and landscapes are associated with nationalism in these poets’ works.
The question at hand is: How do I write a dissertation that accomplishes both objectives? Because the original model of a traditional literary dissertation doesn’t really fit with what I am trying to accomplish, I need to reevaluate how I present my research and the labor and effort I put into my digital tools.
This repository contains...
- the plain-text and CSV files for the entire corpus;
- blog posts documenting my progress working on this dissertation;
- corpus metadata;
- the Zotero bibliography for this project;
- the data visualizations (the sound spectrum, Bryon's Sites of Sound, and Smith's Local Geographies)
The metadata table uses the following fields of categorization:
- Sonnet Number (N/A is used when the provided poem is not classified as a sonnet)
- Poem Title ( my modifications to poem titles are identified with [brackets])
- Collection Title
- Author Name
- Publication Year
- Edition
- Page Location for individual poem
- Total Pages in Volume
- Location Found
The file names for the individual plaintext versions of the poems are identified by volume abbreviation, page number, and shortened poem title. For example, "To Spring" from Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems, Vol I is idenified as:
ESVI_8_tospring
Updates to this website are suspended until further notice.