Finding and figuring flow: Notes toward multidimensional poetry visualization

Under a grant funded by the NEH in the US and the AHRC, ESRC, and JISC in the UK, we are collaborating with computer scientists to create digital poetry visualization tools for fellow creative writers and literary scholars, beginning with sonic patterns and moving on first to more abstract figural constructs such as images and metaphors and then to relationships among poems. Like other digital humanities teams, we aim to develop software that will help readers recognize and analyze patterns in and among poems as aids to close readings and eventually to larger scholarly inquiries. What we hope will help distinguish our project from other efforts, though, is the strong emphasis we are placing on poetry’s multidimensionality—especially its relationship to and experience of time, which we are working to access through time-dependent visualizations via the metaphor of “flow.”