Anna Akhmatova
About this project
We have decided on two major research questions for our Akhmatova project. One of our goals is visualization of change over time. The changes that we are interested in are changes between words, for example rhyme or on a more sophisticated level irony. Therefore we want to both analyze changes within the text on a minute level, the relationship between words, and then work outward from there. For example, we would like to look at the relationship between different parts of the poem in order to record differences in rhyme, irony and tone. We are also trying to measure both linear and nonlinear concordances between words. Furthermore, on a grand scale, we would like to look at the relationship between poems over time. After this is all completed, if we have time, we will analyze differences between translations as a sort of capstone question.
We think it is a reasonable goal for the remainder of the semester to mark up selected poems by Anna Akhmatova, in particular her long poems "Requiem" and "Poem without a Hero." In addition to verse elements such as rhyme and meter, we would like to mark up other ways that linkages and associations are created in verse. It may be possible to represent and visualize relationships between words within the poems through proximity and phonetics, which can then be interpreted, perhaps in terms of tone and irony, perhaps to the effect of revealing new patterns. Similarly, translations of Akhmatova's poems into English may reveal something about the semantic range of these poems.
Our intention in the next week is to establish a common schema for sections of "Requiem," with reference to the TEI guidelines on verse and linking. Once we have negotiated what we want for a project standard, we will divide our texts and each mark them up according to the standard schema. This may take place in two stages; one a matter of laying out the overall structure of headings and stanzas, the next of propagating links between elements and creating alignments between originals and English translations (which, judging by the TEI guidelines, don't tend to interfere with hierarchies for presentation. The texts are generally short enough to tolerate touching twice.
Once we have some texts with at least presentation mark-up, we'd like to get to get to work on XSLT to transform the XML into HTML, on an overall site design, and on building the CSS to support that design (all of these have yet to be broached). This line has a lot of work condensed into it, but I think we were all enthusiastic about each contributing something to all of these elements, so the workload should not be onerous for any one person on this front.
One element of the site design we had already considered was a timeline as a stable element somewhere on any given page, which could serve as a browser of the poems as well as biographical and historical information.
Finally, with reference to what we'll do with all of our mark-up besides display the poems, we are looking at ways to represent visually the relationships and patterns among words--including and beyond linear concordances. We are not sure what the results of this activity will be, but in principle, it will mean the ability to visualize the "semantic halo" of any given word or set of words within a poem or this body of poems, which will be a boon to future interpretive endeavors.
Although I have laid this out in a linear fashion, and we will probably begin each step in this order, the scale of each step is such that we will probably end up working on more than one step simultaneously, as the texts and our progression through class topics allows.
If you have ideas about what further applications we could find for data about translations and relationships among words within poems, we would love to hear them while the project is still young.