going, I assume the sound check and back is OK.
While that's going, I should say I do have about 35,
I don't know if that's a real pocket, about 35 slides
to get to, so I'm going to kind of power through them.
Maybe that's why they call it PowerPoint.
And cut out a lot of the contextual information
and the discussion that I might have done in a longer paper.
I should point out that the slides from this presentation
are on my research blog, which is up at the top there.
So if you wanted to download that, you could do so.
And there's some kind of context in the abstract.
A little bit of context, though, to address the theme
of the conference, cultures, languages, and methods,
I should say that my interest as a literary critic and scholar
has always been primarily in cultures and languages,
more specifically how language is used
in that particular cultural product we call the poem.
My interest in methods in the digital humanities
arose recently and from circumstance
when I came to the University of Waterloo in Canada.
I had previously been working on poetry and dictionaries
as a research fellow in Oxford.
And I soon realized that UW, ironically,
maybe possessed a digital resource
that I didn't previously have access to,
that is the Oxford English Dictionary,
as it had been originally coded and digitized
by computer scientists at the University of Waterloo
in the late 1980s in the raw, marked-up form.
So I began to think a little bit about how
to exploit this resource for my own mercenary literary
critical ends, what it could tell me about the dictionary,
and what it could tell me about poems
that I hadn't known before.
So I'm going to present some of the answers
to those questions that have emerged in the process.
I'm catching up on methodologies, as you'll see.
The Oxford English Dictionary, and here's
where I have to skip a lot of context,
the core of the Oxford English Dictionary
is its 2 and 1 half million illustrative quotations.
A significant portion of these come
from literary and poetic texts.
We know that.
And those shape and illustrate the various sense definitions
of roughly 600,000 English words and word forms.
OED1, that's the dictionary that was produced or published
in 1928, came out of the fascicles before that,
was probably or may have been the first crowd-sourced major
reference work to be produced.
But 1,000 people contributed to the OED1.
And their job was to read, to read
through books of poetry, novels, journals, et cetera,
and to collect from those books quotations that
might illustrate the senses of words.
They would send these back to Oxford,
where lexicographers would use those quotations
to separate senses out and write definitions.
The point about the sourcing and nature of these quotations
is that the OED was conceived on historical principles, which
meant that the quotations are not merely illustrative,
as they had been, for instance, in Johnson,
although they are illustrative.
They also form the basis of evidence
from which lexicographers could write their sense
definitions.
The definitions, in other words, are
based on evidence supplied in the quotations.
So in 1928, the world received its first crowd-sourced
intertextual and hypertextual, at least in the sense
that it refers to other places in itself work,
although none of those words, of course,
are recorded in that dictionary.
Two of them are recorded in later editions.
To summarize very quickly a few of the kind
of obvious conclusions that have been
drawn from this set of facts.
The dictionary, as it appeared in 1928,
and to a large extent later editions,
reflects the reading habits, and therefore
the cultural and literary prejudices
and the educational system of the late 19th century.
And thus, it's not surprising to find in those quotations
all of the markers of social context,
including over-representation and under-representation
of various kinds.
There is one aspect of this contextual information,
though, that although it's been recognized,
at least by editors of the OED, hasn't really been analyzed
or thought about very deeply for reasons
that it will become apparent.
And that is that a significant portion of usage evidence
comes from literary texts, a significant portion of these
from poems.
And this is striking because, by any standard account,
poetic usage tends away from the denotative and definitional
and towards the connotative and metaphorical.
This incidentally, or perhaps not incidentally,
has been a treasured aspect of the work,
especially by literary writers.
And from the first fascicles until today,
authors, poets, and other writers
have used the dictionary not only for information
about language, but also for inspiration, their poems.
So there's a kind of second order intertextuality
at work, which is that this work of reference,
based on some degree on literary and poetic language,
has become a resource for literary and poetic production.
The second order intertextuality
is somewhat nebulous, though, in the sense
that a poem can make use of facts that are recorded
in the OED without actually having the poet actually
having read them there or obtained them there.
And that is, again, a function of the first order
intertextuality.
So the projects, five minutes, the projects
have been working on both identify and to somewhat
quantify different kinds of intertextuality
in the dictionary and in poetry, mainly
interested in contemporary British poetry.
So I'm going to report and discuss on some of my findings
so far in those three rubrics.
Poetry in the OED.
There have been several attempts to quantify
the presence of poetry and its role among the OED's
illustrative quotations, especially
on first quotations.
So for instance, where a word seems
to have been coined in a poem, a lot of people
have done work on that.
Famously, Shakespeare seems to have coined
a large number of words.
These analyses traditionally have relied on a sampling
method, taking a very, very small sample.
And a good example of that is Giles Goodland's paper, OED
Online's Single Quotation Entries and Analysis,
where he took a range from Rab to Raskasi
and found that about 28% of those
come from a poetic source.
Those are words with only one supporting quotation.
Obviously, there are some drawbacks to that method.
I'll skip through most of them.
It's a small sample, not randomly chosen.
And the way of choosing it alphabetically
in alphabetical range has problems associated with that.
Mainly, though, it's not comparable.
So Goodland says, but it's hard to reckon how much
of the OED's source material on average is from poetry.
So my approach has been a lot more comprehensive.
And here I have to kind of scoot.
Here's a look inside the OED's text.
What I've done is taken a list of the 1,000 most quoted
authors' sources, where there's no author.
It's just a work title.
And then Adam Bradley and I went through this list
and identified the authors who we suspected
may have written a poem or two.
So for instance, Shakespeare and Scott.
Most of Scott's stuff is not poetry, but some is.
It's a very messy data set.
For instance, this is all the ways
that Peirce Plowman appears in the OED.
So from the 1,000 sources, we came up with 189
that may have some poetry in them.
That gave rise to 27,000 types, that
is to say, author and work, to inspect.
So that was handed over to undergraduates
in the English department.
So if you want to know what an undergraduate degree in English
is useful for, this is one of many things it's useful for.
Those 27,000 types to inspect gave 322,000 quotations.
And it implies for the ones that were not in our list,
the 800 that weren't in our list, another 1.3 million,
giving a total of 1.3 million marked up for genre.
And that's about a little more than half
of all the quotations.
Here's a summary of various results.
And I'm going to scoot very quickly through.
You'll see that the blue is the untagged or unknown ones.
At the bottom there, you see poetry.
That's green.
And then you might see in the 17th century some verse drama.
That's the coverage, which is very good for some periods,
not so good for other periods.
And there are good reasons for that.
And here's a kind of 50-year chunk,
again with poetry at the bottom there.
But you'll see that in the early periods
it's making up quite a large percentage.
And that's with the unknown ones taken out.
And it changes over time.
And there's a kind of table of the previous data
with percentages and so on.
So I've tried to reproduce Goodland's analysis using my source.
And I come up with roughly similar numbers.
He's using a different edition of the OED,
which might account for some of the diversions there.
OK, I'm going to skip ahead.
Now that I've talked about poems in the OED,
I want to talk about an instance of the possible intertextuality
of the OED or other information about language in poetry.
That is to say, using the OED along with poetic corpora
to find out things.
So there's a little program that I'm using to do this.
And again, I should recognize Adam Bradley's help
in getting it off the ground and catching me up to speed with Python.
So it basically reads a poem.
This is part of a poem.
It then, for every word in it, looks it up
in the OED with various sort of levels of abstraction.
Finds it, goes and gets the entries.
In this case, I'm looking at the etymologies,
because that's where my primary current research is,
etymologies in poetry.
And then generates a kind of filtered list
of all the words around the lookup word and all the words in the etymology.
Stems those and compares them, and in this case, finds the word public.
It then looks at the collocation there and comes up with some metrics
to rate it.
This is the entire poem.
It's a poem I like for reasons I can't explain.
One of them is that it has a professor who is sort of overly
interested in etymologies.
So running this sort of control poem through,
I get results something like that.
And you'll see that that bit where he talks about auction,
Augere, comes up quite well.
This is it sort of represented over the word position.
And this is that first slice there with the metrics.
We're looking for low collocation metrics here.
Represents these pairs from the poem, auction Augere,
augment Augere, author Augere.
So obviously, there's a kind of etymological trope going on there.
This is a much larger corpus of all the poems
I could find in line with the string etym in it.
So edemon, etymologically, etymology.
The strip there is that Galway Canal poem that we just looked at.
And if you run all of those poems through and generate a sort of metric
the first column there is the top of that list.
The bottom column there is the bottom of that list
ranked by this sort of average of averages of metrics.
And then inspecting that list, I come up
with a few that seem to me to be sort of interesting pairs more
than the others.
And looking those up in the OED, I
do find that at least one or two or three of those
are kind of interesting bits of these poems
that I'd like to explore further.
I don't have time to go into this, but the next phase of this project
will be to look at the OED's quotation fields
to find more direct links in terms of causation
or, let's say, source attribution.
So for instance, in the Jeffrey Hill poem that I just put up there,
there are two kind of obvious intertextual links.
They come from Wittgenstein.
But there's another one.
And if you look up tautology in the OED,
you actually find two of them from this poem in the OED.
So you might come up with a kind of hypothesis about that.
I'm going to leave the work to be done slide
as a kind of background to make a little bit of time
for some questions, if there are any.