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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

big humanities, big data, genre analysis, British poetry, macroanalitic research

College

Humanities

Department

English

Abstract

The continual digitalization of society has not only permeated research in the Humanities, but is constantly revealing just how crucial it is to the Humanities’ future. Whereas research in the Humanities is normally limited to a very narrow dataset, digital humanities tools allow for macroanalitic research—research that can analyze vast amounts of texts all at once. The database produced by our project can do just that. Because scholars’ such as Ted Underwood, Matthew Jockers, Franco Moretti, and others at the Stanford Literary Lab have focused extensively on macroanalysis of novels, we envisioned and designed a project focused specifically on poetry—a century’s worth of British poetry no less. Thus, through identifying certain metadata from within a large set of eighteenth-century British poetry, specifically the themes and genres of the poetry, our database provides the means to explore patterns, trends, and variations in such poetry. However, exploring the genre of poetry was not intended to be the end goal; rather, we believed that this line of inquiry might serve as a means to opening a profound set of questions that could account for technical patterns in eighteenth-century poetics, clarify classical influences on style and form, illuminate alternative historical narrative concerning socio-cultural relationships, and help track the evolution of ideas across an important moment in intellectual history. Moreover, we intended this project as a foundation upon which future projects invested in exploring eighteenth-century poetry could be built.

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