Token-Pooled or Equal-Work? Two Ways to Describe a Poetry Corpus
When we analyze a single poem, the basic unit is fairly easy to picture. VerseVAD identifies the words that are … Read more
Introducing VerseVAD Reading Lab and Writing Studio
VerseVAD began as one application: a place to analyze poetry computationally while keeping the poem, the reader, and the limits … Read more
A Closer Look: Interactive Annotation in VerseVAD
VerseVAD has always been designed to bring readers back to the poem. Summary scores can help us identify patterns, compare … Read more
A Poem is Not a Bag of Words
Computational analysis often begins by separating a text into smaller parts. Words are counted, matched to dictionaries, grouped by function, … Read more
Why VerseVAD Shows Its Work
Computational analysis can create an impression of certainty very quickly. A score appears, a category is assigned, and the result … Read more
Why Does “The Raven” Look More Positive Than We Expect?
Nobody is likely to finish reading Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and think, What an upbeat little bird poem. The … Read more
Why Traditional Readability Scores Struggle with Poetry
Readability scores are meant to answer a straightforward question: how difficult is a piece of writing to read? For ordinary … Read more
What VerseVAD Can—and Cannot—Tell Us
Any attempt to analyze poetry with numbers is going to make some readers uneasy. That reaction is understandable. Poetry is … Read more
Reading “The Red Wheelbarrow” with VerseVAD: A Basic Analysis Walkthrough
William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” is a natural place to begin experimenting with VerseVAD. It is short enough to … Read more
What are Valence, Arousal, and Dominance?
When we describe the emotional atmosphere of a poem, we usually reach for words such as joyful, somber, anxious, tender, … Read more