Essays from the project team, lesson plans, and news about how scholars and teachers are using the Princeton Prosody Archive in their research and teaching. Unless otherwise noted, all posts were edited and proofread by General Editor Mary Naydan. Please contact us if you would like to propose an essay based on your work with the Archive. Check back for updates!
What can interactive visualizations show us about the metadata in the PPA? Cecilia Quirk ('24) constructs timelines and networks using Altair and NetworkX APIs to visualize the history of versification.
Selena Hostetler ('23) shares some of the fascinating prosodic systems she encountered while building the PPA's "Typographically Unique" collection, which collects markings unable to be captured by OCR.
We’re thrilled to announce the implementation of a new feature with the 3.9-0 release: the clustering, and default collapsing, of reprints. Read on for intern Selena Hostetler's account of the massive data work required for this feature.
How can tables of contents help us understand what "prosody" meant to a variety of disciplines in the 18th century? Undergraduate researcher Andrew Tye ('21) uses this method to survey 18th-century materials in the Archive.
What do Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and historical prosody have in common? As it turns out, a lot. Undergraduate researcher Margaret King ('22) tours the Twitterverse, with a response written by Prof. Meredith Martin.
What is the best way to visualize the relative size and overlap of the seven Princeton Prosody Archive collections? My quest through Venn diagrams, zoomable treemaps, and UpSet plots led me to an experimental alternative.
Design highlights of PPA in the scope of my contributions: color, including multiple logo variations; interactivity; typefaces; and content organization and hierarchy.
From 2015 to 2017, the PPA refined its core collection by eliminating 3,729 duplicate works. These duplications were the result of our initial file transfer from HathiTrust, a partnership of academic and research institutions offering a collection o…
Teaching my students how to read Victorian poetry is a challenge in itself. Now add teaching them how to read how Victorians read Victorian poetry. What’s more, there’s the challenge of teaching them how to read how the information about Victorian p…
When the Princeton Prosody Archive received its original data from the HathiTrust Digital Library, this data included over three hundred entries attributed to Samuel Johnson. Such a high volume of entries (not to mention the peculiar breadth and ran…
In November 2017 and March 2018, Professor Sean Pryor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia assigned his students in ARTS2033 a writing task using the Princeton Prosody Archive. Pryor and his colleague Ben Etheringon at Western S…
An introduction to versification that melds the classic and the contemporary. Reprinted and adapted from The Pocket Instructor: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016).
In 1857 the North British Review published a seminal essay by Coventry Patmore, ultimately titled English Metrical Law, that influenced poets and metrical theorists from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges to T. S. Omond to Yvor Winters to sever…