Visualizing Poetry: Creating Tools for Critical Analysis

Whereas the New Literary History emphasizes contextualizing literary texts, critics such as Stephen Greenblatt always employ close-reading techniques on the texts at hand. Although digital media allegedly privileges “distant reading” (Moretti), we can develop tools and methods to close-read and analyze documents. Moreover, these analyses can be visualized before being discussed by readers. Although too little work has been done in poetry visualization, it can be used to emphasize the structure of the narrative, the organization of the poem, the language elements, and the metaphors employed (Chaturvedi).