AI and Early Modern Poetry: Data Cleaning on the STEMMA Project

The Digital Humanities Research Group have invited Professor Erin A. McCarthy to their next seminar. She will be talking about the STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475-1700 project funded by the European Research Council. STEMMA develops and applies a data-driven approach in order to provide the first macro-level view of the circulation of early modern English poetry in manuscript. It focuses on English verse manuscripts written and used between the introduction of printing in England in 1475 and 1700. Following a brief introduction to the project, the talk will focus on the team’s early explorations of the use of AI and machine learning techniques to clean and reconcile a large historical dataset. Because early modern scribes altered poetic texts in both intentional and unintentional ways, our hypothesis is that these tools will offer a more effective way to identify duplicate and related records than not only older data matching tools but also traditional philological methods. Moreover, by not requiring us to modernize or standardize strings to find matches, these techniques allow us to preserve important paleographical and orthographical evidence for later textual and literary analyses. While these methods are a tool to enable the project’s advanced analyses rather than an end in themselves, they may also offer transferable and extensible methods for other digital projects.

Erin A. McCarthy is Established Professor of English Literature and Computational Humanities and the Principal Investigator of the STEMMA project at the University of Galway. She is the author of Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public (Oxford University Press, 2020), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE and won the 2020 John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication. She is currently completing two monographs: a jointly authored monograph about the findings of the RECIRC project, “The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing in Manuscript Miscellanies, 1550–1700,” with Marie-Louise Coolahan and Sajed Chowdhury, and a sole-authored monograph called “Interpreting Early Modern Manuscripts: Towards a New Methodology.” Her scholarship has also appeared in the John Donne Journal, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, the Review of English Studies, Criticism, and Reformation.

This event is free and in hybrid format. Please sign up using this form.