PLOTTING POETRY – On Mechanically Enhanced Reading / MACHINER LA POESIE – Sur les lectures appareillées took place on Basel from 5th to 7th October 2017, organised by the University of Basel and the University of Liège. 

On October 6, Clara Martínez Cantón and Pablo Ruiz Fabo, members of the POSTDATA team presented their work “Automatic Enjambment Detection as a New Source of Evidence in Spanish Versification”.
Here’s an excerpt from the conference site describing the focus of the event:
In 1917, commenting on the rise of new media, Apollinaire urged for “plotting/mechanising (“machiner”) poetry as has been done for the world”. A century later, the slogan’s rich metaphor is made all the sharper with the new technologies’ emergence in literary studies. What role have machines taken up in text reading? What do they teach us about the mechanics of poetry? What mechanical and strategic devices are we developing, with what results?
The conference had several sessions specialized in the automatic treatment of different poetic features, besides a critical reflection on the results. For instance, a session was dedicated to rhyme analysis and discovery, e.g. how to identify inexact rhymes. Spoken poetry was also covered, with papers discussing analyses of free verse prosody and poetry-reading.

We also listened to keynote lectures by Franco Moretti (Stanford and Lausanne) and Valérie Beaudouin (who pioneered work on automatic metrical analysis in French) .
Finally, the event was the chance to meet old colleagues that we knew from work related to the POSTDATA project and the LINHD lab or the DH/poetry community, and get to know some new exciting projects too.
Our thanks for this memorable experience go to the superb organization by Anne-Sophie Bories from Basel, Hughes Marchal (Basel) and Gérald Purnelle (Liège)!
For further information, you have here the programme of the Conference )