Editorial

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!

Undergraduates in the PPA: A Project Manager’s Guide to Mentorship

Mary Naydan

How can we make internships for digital humanities projects into meaningful, student-centered experiences?

Book Excerpts, Journal Articles, and Better Metadata

Mary Naydan, Rebecca Sutton Koeser

How we hand-curated metadata so researchers can search and browse only the relevant parts of larger works.

Announcing Our Partnership with ECCO

Mary Naydan, Yan Che, Rebecca Sutton Koeser

Thousands of works from Eighteenth Century Collections Online are at your fingertips.

A New Meterstick: A Visual Analysis of the Princeton Prosody Archive

Cecilia Quirk ('24)

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.

A Typographically Unique Tour of the PPA

Selena Hostetler ('23)

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.

Streamlining Search Results with Clusters

Selena Hostetler ('23), Mary Naydan, Rebecca Sutton Koeser

We’re thrilled to announce the implementation of a new feature with the v3.9 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.

Paratextual Prosodies of the Eighteenth Century

Andrew Tye ('21)

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.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Twitter’s Unexpected Locus of Lay Prosody

Margaret King ('22)

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.

Visualizing the Collections

Rebecca Sutton Koeser

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.

Designing the PPA User Interface & Interactions

Gissoo Doroudian

Design highlights of PPA in the scope of my contributions: color, including multiple logo variations; interactivity; typefaces; and content organization and hierarchy.

Deduplicating the Archive

Meagan Wilson, Mary Naydan

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…

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Pathways through the PPA

Meredith Martin

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…

After lives; or, the true history of Samuel Johnson in a digital archive

Colette Johnson

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 the Classroom: A PPA-based Writing Assignment

Sean Pryor, Meredith Martin

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…

How to Teach Prosody

Meredith Martin

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).

  • Genre: poetry
  • Course Level: introductory
  • Student Di…
Coventry Patmore and the Problem of Excerpts

Meredith Martin

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…