So, were Shakespeare trying to compose trochaic pentameter, with the metric pattern. Take, for example, how Holzer, one of the developers, explained the process: The processor, in response, would then impose the metrical beats regardless of the rhythm of the line, in order to prompt users to negotiate the metrical structure and the rhythm of a language. First, users would choose a metrical form provided by Poetry Processor and try their hand at it. described how Poetry Processor was designed to interactively assist users in composing metrical verse. In the article jointly published in the computer magazine Byte, Newman et al.
#Scansion mending wall software
But there were those who thought otherwise-Michael Newman, Hillel Chiel, and Paul Holzer, the developers of proprietary software Poetry Processor. Thinking analogically about the current climate of entrepreneurial industry in 2017, Hartman’s decision to not pursue inventing a meter checker is not surprising. (And no entrepreneur would bet his shirt on a word processor for poets).” Hartman, however, set aside further sophistications of the Scansion Machine for the next twenty-odd years, stating, “I’m a poet, not a software entrepreneur. According to his autobiographical notes, Hartman also envisioned combining the Scansion Machine and other lineation and random-text generators he had created in order to create a word processor with a meter checker.
Though there remains no executable file for me to demonstrate how the Scansion Machine operates today, suffice it to say that the program was a part of Hartman’s productive, exploratory research that would later bear fruit. Attesting to Hartman’s innovative attempts to identify a comprehensive rule that governs the complex metrical patterns, the Scansion Machine set a rigorous precedent for the automation of scansion. For instance, in order to indicate where the metrical pattern influences the rhythm of a line, Scansion Machine was programmed to use a % mark to indicate a “promoted stress.” For identifying a situation that would call for either a headless line or one or more metrical substitutions, the Scansion Machine was designed to first ignore the potential headless reading and proceed if the line continued with more than three consecutive trochees, the Scansion Machine was then programmed to read it as a headless line. In the description of the Scansion Machine, we can see how Hartman tackled the irregularity of scansion in a groundbreaking manner. According to Hartman’s autobiographical records, the program was taught to follow these five scansion steps based on his own pedagogical experience: 1) find multisyllabic words and mark where the stresses would fall 2) place stresses on the important, monosyllabic words 3) mark the rest as slack 4) divide preliminary marked syllables into feet and 5) write out the finished scansion. Written by Charles Hartman, Scansion Machine was designed to scan a line of iambic pentameter. By taking Hartman’s Scansion Machine as a point of departure, I would like to share my working survey of digital prosody projects and prosody-related visualization methodologies below. Prosody is a part of the conversations I am hoping to accommodate, and that is why I am curious to learn how digital technologies might have informed the epistemologies of prosody to date. As a part of my dissertation research, I am working with literary scholars and archivists to facilitate critical dialogues on literary artifacts including audio and audiovisual recordings of poetry readings one project includes a digital platform for Robert Frost. To be fair, my field is also not strictly in stylistics or in prosody, but in information science and textual scholarship. So one of the first large computer projects I undertook was a Scansion Machine. But one of my fields has been prosody: the study of poetic meter and rhythms. Poet and early computer-based prosody pioneer Charles Hartman notes a similar sentiment in his autobiographical Virtual Muse (1996):Ī search of the catalog in a big library turns up quite a few cross-references between “computers” and “poetry.” But virtually all of the books and articles referred to have to do with “computer stylistics.” That is, they’re documents in the field of literary criticism, and they represent endeavours to study poetry by means of computers, not experiments in making poetry with computers. What are the historical and existing efforts to employ digital technologies for exploring or generating prosody? It turns out, digital technologies seem to have contributed more to the analysis of prosody than to the composition of metrical verse in English.
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