A Generic Tool for Visualizing Patterns in Poetry

Visualization of text can be a useful exploration tool for looking at the corpus of a poet, especially when dealing with a prolific author with a large body of output over the years. In this work, we describe a flexible and extensible tool for analyzing the corpus of a poet, and make a case study of Nâzım Hikmet Ran. Since poetry has its own challenges over plain text, we have developed novel ways of visualizing the structure, the rhythm and affective tone of each poem, as well as ways of looking at the continuities (or discontinuities) of features in the entire corpus over the years. The designed system integrates a database for holding metainformation, and a website for creating and linking interactive, parameterized visualizations. Nâzım Hikmet Ran is one of the most famous poets of Turkey. Although he was a great patriot, he has spent many years in prison and in exile due to his communistic political views. His poetry is translated into more than fifty languages. We believe this tool can be particularly useful to compare different translations of the poet’s work, to see how certain stylistic or semantic features are retained (or lost) during translations.