Topic Modeling and Figurative Language

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

… to have them for an instant in her hands both at once,
the story and its undoing…
from “Self Portrait as Hurry and Delay” [Penelope at her loom]

Located at the center of Jorie Graham’s collection The End of Beauty, “Self Portrait as Hurray and Delay” crafts a portrait of the artist, poised at a precarious moment in which thought begins to take shape. Like Penelope, Graham entertains the illusion, if only momentarily, of a choice between bringing a creative impulse into form or allowing it to come undone. A weaver of language, Graham subtly, deftly, but unsuccessfully attempts to delay the inevitable moment in poetic creation in which complexity of thought adopts form through language, and so realized is also reduced. In The End of Beauty, the beginning of the creative act signals an inevitable descent into meaning — language’s ultimate impulse.

Topic Model Data for Topic Modeling and Figurative Language

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The topic model discussed in “Topic Modeling and Figurative Language” was created with MALLET. Drawing from 4,500 English-language poems from the “Revising Ekphrasis” corpus, the model was generated using the following parameters:

mallet train-topics --input poems-seq.mallet --num-threads 2 --num-topics 60 --optimize-interval 10 --output-model poems08072012test1.model --output-doc-topics poems08072012_test1.txt --output-topic-keys poems08072012-test1keys.txt

The following table contains the number of the topic (0-59); hyper-parameter estimation; and top 20 key words most likely to be found in each topic.

Lrhody on Journal of Digital Humanities

Topic Modeling and Figurative Language

Topic Model Data for Topic Modeling and Figurative Language