Tag Archives: digital humanities

Thermo Pairs, a kind of poem

Latest in the “kind of poem” series [see here and here], this one based on false positives that turned up in my list of invented lexical combinations in James Joyce [“Compounding Joyce“].

19.05.2015 – 17:54 | By D-AW | Posted in Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Compounding Joyce

LOW on demand! This afternoon the Twitter threw up this query, following on from my last post on cutthroat compounds [Catchall for Cutthroats]: Well, here at The Life of Words, we aim to please. Since I’ve been mucking around with Python scripts to get at OED’s combinational formations (those bits typically at the end of […]

18.05.2015 – 18:44 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

Catchall for cutthroats

What is the difference between a catch-all and a catch-phrase? Both are compounds formed as Verb+Noun, but in catch-all, the noun is the direct object of the verb, whereas in catch-phrase it is the subject. That is, a catch-all is something that catches all things, whereas a catch-phrase is not something that catches phrases – […]

15.05.2015 – 17:33 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Etymology, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (7)

Little Miss Bossy Pants

In the comments to a Facebook share of my previous post on gendered language on Ratemyprofessors.com [“Vivid Unconscious Biases“], JB, a friend of a friend, writes: “bossy” is an inherently gendered term and is always used as an insult. I can’t remember ever hearing it applied to a man. Indeed, it strikes me that calling […]

11.02.2015 – 17:05 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Now With More Nodes! Updated Prize Network Maps

In his comments to my last post on “Poetry Prize Networks in the UK“, Neil Astley said my maps ought to have included the Costa Poetry Awards. This had occurred to me when I was putting them together, but I hadn’t been able to track down a proper list of the judges for that prize. […]

23.01.2015 – 13:39 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (6)

Assessing Poetry Assessor

The web application called “Poetry Assessor” has had a second wave of attention since going back online recently. In this post I want to show why Poetry Assessor doesn’t assess poetry, and to make a broader point about the “Humanities” in “Digital Humanities”: that bad disciplinary training makes for bad interdisciplinary work. It’s a longish […]

06.11.2014 – 20:27 | By D-AW | Posted in Criticism, Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (5)

Subsequent OED Quotations

You sometimes hear that Shakespeare contributed more words to the English language than anyone else. This claim is based on searches of the quotation evidence in the 2nd edition of the OED. In OED2, Shakespeare is the most-cited single-author source [33,131 quotations], and the most first-cited source in an entry [first evidence for 2,017 words], […]

21.10.2014 – 17:44 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

“Pneumatic Bliss” – Eliot’s Breasty OED Entry

More from the T. S. Eliot / Oxford English Dictionary files [for background, see “Did TSE use OED, SOED, or COD?” and “Eliotic OED“]. In the latter post, I noted that 0.0135% of OED definitions contain the phrase “[with/in] allusion to” and that two of these are to poems by Eliot. Here are lines from […]

13.10.2014 – 15:24 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Eliotic OED

[UPDATE 9/15: If what follows interests you at all please see this update: “Two Notes on T. S. Eliot and the OED“] OED editor Robert Burchfield was responsible for adding Woolfian, Poundian, Joycean, Yeatsian, and Audenesque to the dictionary while preparing the Supplement of 1976-86 (later incorporated into the Second Edition, OED2). There’s no Eliotesque or […]

06.10.2014 – 18:45 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (4)

The Queen’s English – Respec’

Looking through some graduate work the other day I came across a reference to “the Queen’s English,” in scare quotes, used in the general sense to describe the phenomenon of socially privileged dialect (as opposed to a specific British class dialect). I’ve never heard “the Queen’s English” actually referred to positively or unironically. In my […]

15.09.2014 – 14:29 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)