metronome-paper

LaTeX and figures for the preprint 'Metronome: tracing variation in poetic meters via local sequence alignment'.

(slightly outdated) poster summarizing the project

The compiled preprint is also included.

Further information will be added if the paper is accepted for publication.

WARNING This is a preprint, which has not been peer reviewed. Any final paper will almost certainly include changes, which can sometimes be quite substantial. The results listed are also subject to change.

LaTeX 'ceur' style modified from the CEUR Workshop template (see copyrights etc)

ABSTRACT

All poetic forms come from somewhere. Prosodic templates can be copied for generations, altered by individuals, imported from foreign traditions, or fundamentally changed under the pressures of language evolution. Yet these relationships are notoriously difficult to trace across languages and times. This paper introduces an unsupervised method for detecting structural similarities in poems using local sequence alignment. The method relies on encoding poetic texts as strings of prosodic features using a four-letter alphabet; these sequences are then aligned to derive a distance measure based on weighted symbol (mis)matches. Local alignment allows poems to be clustered according to emergent properties of their underlying prosodic patterns. We evaluate method performance on a meter recognition tasks against strong baselines and show its potential for cross-lingual and historical research using three short case studies: 1) mutations in quantitative meter in classical Latin, 2) European diffusion of the Renaissance hendecasyllable, and 3) comparative alignment of modern meters in 18--19th century Czech, German and Russian. We release an implementation of the algorithm as a Python package with an open license.

Reproduction Instructions

This repository contains a list of frozen versions which you can use to install the exact module versions that were used to produce the various analyses and figure material for the preprint. This won't keep it reproducible forever, but it's a start.

1. Clone this repository

   cd /path/to/clone/into
   git clone https://github.com/bnagy/metronome-paper
   

2. Create and activate a new Python virtual environment

   python -m venv /path/to/metronome-venv
   source /path/to/metronome-venv/bin/activate
   

3. Install the requirements

   pip install -r metronome-paper/repro/frozenvers.txt
   

4. Run the ipython notebooks from the repro directory while the venv is activated

R Environment

To reproduce the figures on your own machine you will also need a working R environment. Hopefully the data visualisation is not as dependent on specific versions as the analysis and clustering code, but just in case, the R sessionInfo() for each notebook is included at the end.

Citation

If you are also playing the Fun Academia Game, please cite to help us refill our Academia Hearts ❤️❤️❤️♡♡.

@article{nagy_etal_metronome,
    author          = "Ben Nagy and Artjoms Šeļa and Mirella {De Sisto} and Petr Plecháč",
    title           = "(Preprint) {M}etronome: tracing variation in poetic meters via local sequence alignment",
    year            = "2024",
    publisher       = {github},
    version         = {v1.0.0},
    howpublished    = "\url{https://github.com/bnagy/metronome-paper}"
}

LICENSE

CC-BY 4.0 (see LICENSE.txt)