From Page to Screen: Exploring Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” Through the Computational Lens of “Transpoemation”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1206.06Keywords:
literary criticism, close reading, visualization, distant reading, transpoemationAbstract
Literary critics value the process of “close reading” which involves focused word-by-word and line-by-line reading of a literary work to derive meaning from the entire corpus and establish the role of different aspects of text in this process. As this strategy may yield previously unnoticed connotations, it is rarely performed using computer software. Although this is a widely established view, in this paper, we posit that “distant reading” using an appropriate combination of automatic/computer-assisted analytical methods can still achieve this purpose. While we do not undermine the value of the traditional process, we demonstrate that a detailed visualization of the literary work in focus (in our case a poem by William Wordsworth) through digital tools like “transpoemation” could augment the literary analysis process.
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