PDD - Poetic Devices Detector

PDD is an Excel-based distant reading research tool I created for this PhD research on the English (re)translations of the Haggadah. I am creating a digital corpus of more than 50 different English translations dating from the first (1770) to modern ones and am using digital tools to analyze and visualize these. More about my research HERE. The Haggadah text contains many poetic devices and as such is a real challenge for translators. Some disregard most and focus on accuracy of content while others attempt to imitate the textual structures as closely as possible. This tool helps to differentiate between these two groups by focusing on and visualization of three distinct poetic devices: End of line rhyme, end of line word repetition and initial letter abecedarian acrostics. The initial hypothesis is that a high frequency of any of these (or a combination) in comparison to other translations in the corpus will point to a translation in which also other poetic devices are distinct. This can thus be used as a starting point for further close reading. Although in principle one could just read through all versions in the corpus to manually identify the poetic translations, this is not practical in larger corpora. In addition, the tool sometimes highlights places of interest easily missed with cursory reading.

The tool in its present state is in the proof of concept state. Some Haggadot translations have been entered together with several comparison texts (Othello Act 1 and Wikipedia Articles on Neville Chamberlain and Ogden Nash.) Upon downloading the tool it will reside on the local host, meaning results for new texts entered by the user will be saved in the user’s program only and will not be visible/ shareable with others.

A detailed explanation what PDD does and how to work with it can be found HERE.