Quantifying Prosodic Variability in Middle English Alliterative Poetry
Abstract
Interest in the mathematical structure of poetry dates back to at least the 19th century: after retiring from his mathematics position, J. J. Sylvester wrote a book on prosody called . Today there is interest in the computer analysis of poems, and this paper discusses how a statistical approach can be applied to this task. Starting with the definition of what Middle English alliteration is, and William Langland's are used to illustrate the methodology. Theory first developed for analyzing data from a Riemannian manifold turns out to be applicable to strings allowing one to compute a generalized mean and variance for textual data, which is applied to the poems above. The ratio of these two variances produces the analogue of the F test, and resampling allows p-values to be estimated. Consequently, this methodology provides a way to compare prosodic variability between two texts.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1501.03214,
title = {Quantifying Prosodic Variability in Middle English Alliterative Poetry},
author = {Roger Bilisoly},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.03214},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
12 pages, 8 figures. Based on a presentation given at the Joint Statistical Meetings, Section on Statistical Learning and Data Mining, which took place August, 2014, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA