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Poetry in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: A Computational StudyAuthor: Amitha Gopidi Date: 2020-05-12 Report no: IIIT/TH/2020/37 Advisor:Aniket Alam AbstractPoetry is one of the oldest and most widely practised art forms, by far the most popular medium to represent aesthetics in text. However, over the last few decades, a rumour has grown in strength that poetry, perhaps, is dying. Some studies do suggest that readership of poems has declined in the second half of the twentieth century as different forms of prose have emerged to be the preferred forms of expression of our age. However, with the proliferation of social media and Web 2.0, poems are witnessing a revival. Prose emerged on the literary scene parallel to the rise of modernity and the market. Since then, it has grown in both extent and variety, and today is the dominant artform for textual aesthetics. Parallel to this rise of prose, poetry has witnessed a radical transformation both in its form and content, but also in the role it plays in society. The democratization of literature that the rise of prose represents reflects in poetry losing its traditional scaffolding of meter, rhyme and other poetic devices. The emergent forms of poetry allow it to be practised more widely and in a variety of forms. However, this also meant that the poem lost its ontological precision. This thesis is an exploration of the travels of the poem as a form and a genre in the age of mechanical reproduction; an age which democratizes as well as breaks restrictive structures in its drive towards its prime tenets of uniformity and accessibility. The first part of this thesis studies the various definitions of poetry and identifies their inadequacy in setting ontologically precise boundaries. Today, it is nearly impossible for us to identify a poem by any currently accepted definition. Based on this, the thesis proposes a hypothesis that poetry is merging into prose at the level of its basic ontology. The second part tries to prove this hypothesis by computationally showing the reducing distance between prose and poetry. It does this by using novel features and machine learning techniques. Consequently, we try to work towards a new definition of a poem which tries to preserve some elements of form, such that a poem retains ontological coherence. The fourth part concludes that for the revival of the craft of poetry-writing, a better alternative to computational poetry generation, is a personalized poetry assistant created using machine learning techniques. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Exact Humanities |
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