SUTD 02.136DH Lyric Poetry Digital Humanities Project
Project Title: Who might be the actual author of “A Visit of St. Nicholas”?
Description: Digital Humanities is a study where one uses computational and statistical analysis, informational retrieval, topic modelling, and data visualization on archives and collections that are vastly larger than any human can handle” (Berry, What are the digital humanities? 2019). This paper aims to show, through stylometric tools, that humanists can discover insights to humanities’ questions that would otherwise require large corpus linguistic study. Hence, the objective is to leverage stylometric analysis to analyze an extensive compilation of poems by two disputed poets and provide insights into the controversy over the actual author of the poem, “A Visit of St. Nicholas”. Also, from the computational results, this paper will conduct a literary analysis to evaluate the performance of such digital tools. The stylometric tool of choice will be a “stylo” package in RStudio (R programming language platform), and the poets we will focus on are Clement Clarke Moore and Henry Livingston Jr. From both our statistical and literary analysis, we can conclude that Henry Livingston Jr is highly likely to be the real author of the poem “A Visit of St Nicholas”.
Tools used:
- R to do the natural langugage processing tasks. Using the stylo (GUI) package
├───Code
│ ├───Poetry
│ │ └───corpus
│ └───Poetry 2
│ ├───primary_set
│ └───secondary_set
└───Deliverables- Code: Contain the R codes
- Deliverables: Contain the final report
Stylo package guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWOCfZnitdc