Connections 20037 - Poetry and the Computer

Institution:

Wheaton College - Massachusetts

Subject:

Description:

English Renaissance poets explored the resources of their language in the new age of print and were fascinated by techniques of Latin, French and Italian versification. Their experimentation with sound and word patterns makes their work particularly interesting to study with the analytical tools available through computer programs. Recent advances in computer software-hypertext, database methodologies, and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)-have made it possible to query texts for recurrences of linguistic and lexical features and to "automatically" prepare exhaustive concordancesand stylistic textual analyses. Students participating in this connection will discover how programming (or scripting) facilitates top-down thinking and practice with real-world, problem-solving skills such as problem decomposition and writing algorithms. They will be required to complete work in one course that relies on work already done in the other. In Computing for Poets (Comp 131) all students will be expected to design experiments by asking original questions of a book, poem, author or corpus of texts, and to write computer programs in Perl to analyze a given text. This might be an ancient work, a set of poems or even a student's paper written for some other course. Students who have first taken Eng 313, however, will be required to use authors studied in that course for their experiments. In a final programming project, students will write software to conduct an authorship attribution experiment using 17th-century poets. Students who take Eng 313 after completing the current version of Comp 131 will be required to write an analytic paper on one of the poets from the authorship attribution experiment they have performed in that course. Connections: Comp 131 Computing for Poets and Eng 313 Early Modern English Poetry

Credits:

1.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.wheatoncollege.edu

Phone Number:

(508) 285-7722

Regional Accreditation:

New England Association of Schools and Colleges

Calendar System:

Semester

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