Meter, rhythm, and rhyme


Maintained by: David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt@gmail.com) [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License] Last modified: 2017-11-18T17:02:00+0000


The computationally assisted analysis of formal features in Russian poetry

About this site

This project, developed by Elise Thorsen and David J. Birnbaum, is dedicated to the design and deployment of computational tools to support the analysis of formal features in Russian poetry. These tools involve the detection of stress in Russian texts presented in native orthography and the subsequent derivation of meter and rhyme patterns from stress and orthographic information. The output of those processes is an XML document that can provide the basis for visualizations of formal features (see, for example, the verse tables of the sample poems below). Beyond these reports, the informational mark-up of poetic texts is intended to enable the characterization of formal features in large digitized poetic corpora to support research in sub-fields including quantitative metrics, genre studies, and diachronic studies of stylistics and influence.

Selected publications and conference presentations

Working papers and research reports

Sample poems

Under development; interim results

GitHub repositories

Miscellaneous


Unless otherwise specified, all materials on this site were developed by Elise Thorsen and David J. Birnbaum. The development of the stress dictionary was assisted by Sam Depretis and Erin Harrington; portions of the poetry corpus were edited by Kyleen Pickering. The graph at the top of this page, illustrating the metrical realization of iambic tetrameter according to syllable position, is from: N. V. Lapšina, I. K. Romanovič, and B. I. Jarxo, Metričeskij spravočnik k stixotvorenijam A. S. Puškina, Moscow: Academia, 1934, p. 134bis. http://feb-web.ru/feb/pushkin/critics/jar/jar-005-.htm.