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. To do this, I will consider how sound words signal connotation of home or difference through varying degrees of music, noise, and/or silence.
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 phase of the project aims to use text-mining analyses to catalogue word frequencies and mapping real, plottable locations in Charlotte Smith's Elegaic Sonnets and Other Poems, Vol. 1 (1797) 6th edition, Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems, Vol. 2 (1797) 6th edition, and Beachy Head: with other poems (1807) second edition, The Emigrants : a poem, in two books (1793) from HathiTrust.
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
I will be adding content from my first chapter on William Wordsworth and sound.