The group “Plotting Poetry” is a keen gathering of scholars developing various computing and statistical apparatuses to describe and analyse metre, style and poetics. We entrust them with part of our research to gain in speed and/or power, escape the physical boundaries of what our mind can embrace, rethink the usual questions and address new ones previously out of reach of traditional readings. Statistical analyses, digital corpuses, miscellaneous inventories shed light upon literature and provide our interpretations with the physical evidence they had to do without so far, and they in turn raise hermeneutic challenges.
If you apply, would like to apply, or think one is entitled to apply mechanical devices to the reading of poetic texts, if you are keen on databases, text mining, stylometry or computational stylistics, then you are one of our group.
We focus on poetics, metrics, and stylistics, are open to adjacent fields, and try to gather once a year to share our findings and progress. Devices that did not yield the expected results, provided their shortcomings provide an interesting insight, are welcome too.
This group was born from the conference organised in Basel in October 2017 by Anne-Sophie Bories (Universität Basel), with the collaboration of Hugues Marchal (Universität Basel) and Gérald Purnelle (Université de Liège), where Franco Moretti and Valérie Beaudouin gave keynote lectures.
A second gathering happened in Berlin in September 2018, in the form of a workshop co-organised by Anne-Sophie Bories and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek (FU Berlin), and a third conference was co-organised in Nancy in September 2019 by Anne-Sophie Bories and Véronique Montémont (ATILF). A fourth conference was to take place in Prague in September 2020, thanks to Petr Plecháč and Robert Kolár, but had to be cancelled as a result of the covid19 outbreak.
The 5th Plotting Poetry conference was held in Tartu (Estonia) on 4-5-6 July 2022, organised by Mari Sarv, Maria-Kristiina Lotman, Susanna Mett, Anne-Sophie Bories, Pablo Ruiz Fabo and Petr Plecháč.
The 6th conference was organised in June, 2023 at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) and Institute for Literary Studies Research Centre for the Humanities, in Budapest, by Levente Selàf, Margit Kiss, Anne-Sophie Bories, Petr Plechàč and Pablo Ruiz Fabo.
The 7th edition happened in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, in June 2024, organised by Anne-Sophie Bories, Nils Couturier, Petr Plechàč, Pablo Ruiz Fabo with the help of Pascaline Loricourt.
The next Plotting Poetry conference is expected in 2025 in the Czech Republic!
Steering Committee:
Anne-Sophie Bories (University of Basel),
Petr Plecháč (Institute of Czech Literature of the CAS),
Pablo Ruiz Fabo (Université de Strasbourg)
If you would like to join us:
please email Anne-Sophie Bories: a.bories@unibas.ch
or simply join our googlegroup: https://groups.google.com/forum/embed/?place=forum/plotting-poetry#!forum/plotting-poetry