VerseVAD is a suite of computational tools for reading, writing, and studying poetry. Across three connected applications, it brings transparent language analysis into different parts of the literary experience: close analysis, reflective reading, and the writing process itself.
The project is built around a simple idea: computation can help us notice patterns in language, but it cannot replace the work of interpretation. VerseVAD draws measurable evidence out of poems and puts that evidence back in the hands of readers, writers, students, teachers, and researchers.
Three Ways Into the Work
Analyze (Cloud / Local)
Explore lexical, affective, structural, phonological, and readability patterns in individual poems and larger collections. VerseVAD is the main analytical environment for close reading, comparison, research, and computational literary study.
Reading Lab (Cloud)
Make a prediction about a poem before seeing the measurements, compare your expectations with the evidence, and reflect on the difference. Reading Lab is a guided reading experience built around attention, curiosity, and interpretation.
Writing Studio (Cloud / Local)
Draft and revise alongside selected VerseVAD analysis tools. Writing Studio brings computational evidence into the writing process without generating the writing for you. Version control and project saving included.
One Methodology, Different Experiences
VerseVAD, Reading Lab, and Writing Studio are separate applications, but they share the same underlying philosophy. Each begins with language that a person has chosen to read, study, or write. Computational methods can then help surface patterns in emotion, concreteness, familiarity, sound, structure, and other features that may be difficult to see at a glance.
What changes from one program to another is the question being asked.
VerseVAD asks, What patterns can we measure in this text? Reading Lab asks, How does that evidence compare with what I expected to find? Writing Studio asks, What can these patterns help me notice while I am revising my own work?
None of the three is designed to decide what a poem means. They are designed to give readers and writers more evidence to think with.
VerseVAD draws on established lexical, psycholinguistic, phonological, and computational resources to examine features such as valence, arousal, dominance, emotional association, concreteness, lexical frequency, age of acquisition, sensorimotor language, readability, pronunciation, meter, rhyme, and poetic structure.
The exact tools available vary by application. The core VerseVAD environment offers the deepest analytical workspace, while Reading Lab and Writing Studio use selected parts of the methodology for their own purposes.
Every result is intended to remain inspectable. Where possible, VerseVAD shows the underlying matches, denominators, coverage, weighting choices, source resources, contributor words, and methodological cautions behind the numbers.
Not a Replacement for Reading
This section should probably stay. It may even become more important now that there are three applications.
A poem is not reducible to a score. It is shaped by sequence, sound, syntax, metaphor, repetition, context, history, performance, and the experience of the person reading it. VerseVAD can measure some features of a poem, but those measurements are only part of the evidence available to us.
That limitation is intentional.
The aim of the project is not to automate literary interpretation. It is to create tools that make certain patterns easier to inspect, compare, question, and return to the poem with.
Built for Transparency, Private by Design
VerseVAD is designed around transparent and reproducible methodology. Analytical reports identify the resources, settings, coverage, denominators, and calculation rules used to produce their results. Missing evidence remains missing rather than being silently treated as neutral, and fixed scoring profiles are documented so that the same result can be understood and reproduced later.
The project continues to evolve as methods are tested, assumptions are challenged, and new use cases emerge. Unexpected results are part of that process. When the software gives us a strange answer, the goal is not to hide it. The goal is to understand why.
VerseVAD is available in different forms depending on the application. The main VerseVAD environment and Writing Studio can be used locally or in the cloud. Reading Lab is designed as a cloud-only, session-based experience.
The local applications run on the user’s own computer and do not transmit the text being analyzed to an external service. VerseVAD does not use generative AI to create poetry or other literary work. Its computational methods are intended to analyze language that the user deliberately provides.
Start Wherever You Are
You do not need to be a computational linguist to use VerseVAD. You do not need to know what valence is before opening Reading Lab, and you do not need to understand lexical frequency before beginning a draft in Writing Studio.
The tools are designed to make digital humanities methods more approachable without pretending that the methods are simple, infallible, or complete.
Read a poem. Write one. Analyze a collection. Follow a strange result. Ask a better question.
That is enough to begin.