The POSTDATA team has been present at the annual Plotting Poetry conference in Nancy. In it, we had the opportunity to meet new tools and fields of study of different researchers from both Europe and the United States.
As soon as we entered the conference room, two large posters stood out, one blue and in English and the other white in French. In both posters, with excessively long texts, a high density of words and no images, the author Rémi Forte (a student of fine arts at ANRT in Nancy) showed us his experiment in which he tried to create a text that emulated computer code.
These two days have dealt with subjects so varied that they range from Hebrew liturgical poetry, stylometry, tools for annotation (catma.de) and corpus visualisation, to the use of automatic learning techniques for processing large collections of texts or for the automatic generation of Poetry. In this last field we have seen two different approaches that try to achieve the same end, as we have been able to learn with the talk of Pablo Gervás and Thomas Haider, using statistical analysis and automatic learning tools, respectively.
Equally interesting have been Natalie Houston’s papers and her study of rhyme in English poetry, and how words that rhyme with each other are related, and Valérie Beaudouin’s paper on rap music and its relationship with metrics.

We have also had the opportunity to listen to two people who have been working in the digital humanities for many years, Anne Bandry-Scubbi and Jan-Christof Meister, who have told us about the evolution that has taken place in this field from their own personal experiences.

“Plotting the Poetry” Conference website: https://machinerlapoesie.wordpress.com/conferences/nancy-2019/