Ends of Prosody: Histories, Methods, Frictions
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the School of Information
This talk begins with a study of canon dynamics in the Princeton Prosody Archive (PPA), a collection of over three centuries of writing about verse, pronunciation, and poetic form. Using neural entity linking and biographical metadata, we trace the poets and poems who recur in prosodic discourse and ask how particular writers and their poetry became usable as examples in teaching about verse. The project raises questions that are as methodological as they are historical: what actually counts as a poet being mentioned, how do we resolve unstable historical names at scale, and — above all — where do computational proxies begin to diverge from the phenomenon they are trying to capture?
This work grew out of The Ends of Prosody, a small conference held at Princeton University in 2025. Large digital humanities and computational humanities conferences are valuable because they bring together a wide range of materials and methods. However, as those meetings have grown, there is less room for sustained exchange around a common object of study. At Ends of Prosody, we experimented with both another scale and format where a small group of literary scholars, digital humanists, and computer scientists worked from the same large historical dataset while pursuing quite different questions and methods. We use that experience to make a case for ‘micro-conferences for macro-analysis’ as a complement to larger disciplinary meetings.
The Cultural Analytics Series is a series of lunchtime talks and workshops highlighting research that focuses on the data-driven analysis of cultural phenomena.
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| 12:00 pm | Pre-talk lunch |
| 12:15 pm | Talk |
Speakers
Meredith Martin
Professor of English
Princeton University
Meredith Martin is a professor of English and faculty director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, which started under her leadership in 2014.
Her book, The Rise and Fall of Meter, Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930(Princeton UP, 2012), was the winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book, the Warren Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism, and co-winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the Best First Book in Victorian Studies. Her second book Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody (Princeton UP, 2025) argues that poetry can teach us how to think critically about data, and that critical data studies can teach us something about how we read poems.
With several collaborators, she has been building and directing, since 2007, the Princeton Prosody Archive, which contains writing on poetics, prosody, rhetoric, grammar, speech, and literary history published 1570–1923. That archive of materials has been transformed into datasets which form the basis of several ongoing computational projects about how to read historical data about poems. Fall 2026 special issues in Victorian Poetry and The Journal of Cultural Analytics are dedicated to the literary and computational work that the PPA database and datasets have inspired. In 2015, Martin received the Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship for research on ongoing project Before We Were Disciplines: Poetry at the Origin of Language. She is co-writing Data Work in the Humanities with Zoe LeBlanc, assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and former CDH postdoctoral fellow. She is working with a team at Johns Hopkins on the Schmidt Sciences Grant “A Toolkit for finding latent hierarchical structure in humanistic data.”
Wouter Haverals
Associate Research Scholar & Perkins Fellow
Princeton University
Wouter Haverals is an associate research scholar at the Center for Digital Humanities and a Perkins Fellow at the Humanities Council at Princeton University.
Wouter’s research explores innovative ways to address questions in the field of literary studies through the use of computational methods. In his doctoral research, he applied machine learning techniques to revisit a long-neglected question in traditional literary scholarship: what are the rhythmic characteristics of the atypical Middle Dutch poetic meter? More recently, he worked with handwritten text recognition technology to shed light on a corpus of texts by medieval scribes in the low countries.
Wouter has written on rhythm and prosody in medieval contexts; medieval poetics; computational stylometry; digital scholarly editing; and children’s literature. He also devotes significant efforts to non-Western and historically under-resourced languages, serving on the technical council for the Erasmus+ project DigiPhiLit, which focuses on incorporating digital methodologies in the study of Hispanic-Filipino literature.
Wouter defended his Ph.D. in literature and linguistics in January 2020 at the University of Antwerp, where he also served as a postdoctoral researcher. He has been a visiting scholar at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam and at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow.
Contact
If you have questions about this event, please contact Lilli Wessling Hart at lilli@berkeley.edu.
Getting to South Hall
Accessibility
If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting, CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about mobility access in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Heather Rapp with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7–10 days in advance of the event.
