New Issue of YOU ARE HERE Featuring a MARGENTO Poem

YOU ARE HERE 
[follow the hyperlink to the publication's website and/or find below the current issue's coordinates]



Read issue XVIII of You Are Here HERE!!!

ASYMPTOTE International Translation Contest--CLOSE APPROXIMATIONS

Fantastic news for emerging translators all over the world: 'Close Approximations,' Asymptote’s hugely popular translation contest, is back! Open to translators at the beginning of their careers, this contest invites translations in three genres: poetry, fiction, and—a new category this year—literary nonfiction. The winner and runner-up of each category will walk away with 1,000 USD and 500 USD respectively.

In addition to winning some serious prize money, they will also be featured in... MORE HERE

NICOLAE COANDE--Poem in PLUME

THE BRIDGE by Nicolae Coande (trans. by MARGENTO, Martin Woodside, & Lia Elena Boangiu)

The most beautiful Russian girl in the world lives in Germany
tucked in a safe with a Cyrillic cipher. The Germans still bang their heads
against a wall over it. Even so, her hands weave a bridge to me, her blue eyes...

MORE HERE

POESIS INTERNATIONAL no 15

Poesis International continues with tireless and versatile poet, critic, and translator Claudiu Komartin at the helm as Editor in Chief, coming up with yet another impressive issue featuring translations from or criticism on luminaries like Ezra Pound, Mike Strand, Mariana Marin, O.Nimigean, Fady Joudah, and Aurel Pantea, and contributions from (or on) established writers such as Constantin Abaluta, Nicolae Coande, Radu Vancu, Rita Chirian, Dan Sociu, Nicoale Avram, Mihail Vakulovski, Teodora Coman, Marius Chivu, Marius Surleac, and last but not least, Komartin himself, among many many others--well known figures and rising stars; poetry, fiction, criticism, drama, and interviews; translations from and into Romanian; Polish, British, Czech, Ukrainian, Swedish, Croatian, French, Slovenian, and Hungarian dernier-cri innovative literature in remarkable translations.
The journal has also launched a new website--multilingual!--and impressively designed by Ana Toma (also responsible for the publication's cover art).  ENJOY!

ASYMPTOTE Mega-Summer Issue

Also including a multilingual poem by Mircea Cartarescu and an essay by Ruxandra Cesereanu exploring a possible parallel between Alexandru Musina's "Budila Express" and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" HERE

MARGENTO & Inkpen Paper @ New Directions in the Humanities Conference 2015

Chris Tanasescu (MARGENTO) & Diana Inkpen: “Poetry Computational Graphs: Applying Graph Theory in Poetry”

[this paper is part of the ongoing Graph Poem project]

Excerpt:
… As we have already seen is the case of the previous publication in poetry computational analysis, collecting data and the features of the databases analyzed are more intimately related to the specifics and performance of the resulting classifiers and computational tools than one would suspect, and moreover, they also involve weighty even if implicit or unconscious cultural and literary choices.  But the issue is even far more complex than that.  Data in general and particularly the huge amount of data that is continuously made available and that grows exponentially in the digital age has attracted the attention of major scholars before and has actually meanwhile come to represent not only a self-sufficient subject and a challenge to a variety of disciplines, but even a new research paradigm.  This fourth paradigm succeeds according to Gray and Szalay (2007) three older ones, the experimental, theoretical, and simulation paradigms, and in computer science “it means that the term e-science is not primarily concerned with faster computation, but with more advanced database technologies.” (Levallois, Steinmetz, and Wouters 2013, 152)  For Jim Gray, a late computer scientist “celebrated as a visionary” (id.), we are witnessing the evolution of two branches in every discipline, “a computational branch and a data-processing branch” (ibid. 153), and the new field dedicated to studying such ramifications is called data-intensive research or data-intensive science.  There is no consensus as to when data are large or complex enough to qualify as object of data-intensive research, especially since huge or massive may mean completely different things in different fields and disciplines, but Levallois, Steinmetz, and Wouters advance a very relevant and potentially very useful definition: “data-intensive research [is] research that requires radical changes in the discipline” involving “new, possibly more standardized and technology-intensive ways to store, annotate, and share data,”  a concept that therefore “may point toward quite different research practices and computational tools.” (id.)
In the contributions quoted above the poem datasets are in the hundreds (the largest one, the Malay corpus containing 1,500 elements, while the other handful of papers ever published on computational poetry analysis employ significantly smaller sets or corpora), whereas our first paper—focusing on multilabel subject-based classifications of poems—analyzed over 11,000 poems in Poetry Foundation’s database, and since we have meanwhile consistently expanded our corpora by including material from more and more print and online sources, we can assert that the size of our databases and corpora can count as the basis for data-intensive research.
On the other hand, we do use different research practices in that we put together a model that analyzes poems comprehensively and not limiting the approach (as the precedent computational analysis approaches have) to only (one or several aspects of) one poetic feature—diction, subject, form, etc.  Moreover, using graph theory applications in analyzing both particular poems and poetry corpora is a completely novel poetry criticism and analysis practice, and it involves in its turn different computational tools than what has been used so far in the field.  These tools range from meter parsers to locating enjambments to assembling weighted graphs of poems and analyzing features such connectivity and spotting cut vertices.
...
from the Conclusions:

The Graph Poem Project is:

•The first big data poetry analysis project;

•The first data-intensive poetry project;

•The first application of graph theory in poetry computational analysis; with further poetry criticism and creative writing related benefits;

but, also has to:

•Keep developing the data-intensive work towards comprehensively covering the print and online poetry in North America, in the English language, and in English translation;

•Continue refining the tools (the issue of syntax in contexts of erratic punctuation; tropes).

http://thehumanities.com/…/program-and…/schedule-of-sessions

http://thehumanities.com

MARGENTO @ FLAIRS-28: Multilabel Subject-based Classification of Poetry

Multilabel Subject-based Classification of Poetry
Andres Lou, Diana Inkpen and Chris Tanasescu (MARGENTO)

[This paper is part of the larger ongoing MARGENTO project "The Graph Poem"]

Abstract
Oftentimes, the question “what is this poem about?” has no
trivial answer, regardless of length, style, author, or context
in which the poem is found. We propose a simple system
of multi-label classification of poems based on their subjects
following the categories and subcategories as laid out by the
Poetry Foundation. We make use of a model that combines
the methodologies of tf-idf and Latent Dirichlet Allocation
for feature extraction, and a Support Vector Machine model
for the classification task. We determine how likely it is for
our models to correctly classify each poem they read into one
or more main categories and subcategories. Our contribution
is, thus, a new method to automatically classify poetry given
a set and various subsets of categories.
[...]

Classifying Poetry
In this work, we focus on how the vocabulary of a poem
determines its subject. While seemingly intuitive, this
notion is a much more difficult task to perform than what
it seems at first glance. As an example, let us consider the
following excerpt from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"
by T. S. Eliot:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

As is the case with many modern and contemporary poems,
the subject of this celebrated high modernist piece is
problematic, elusive, and multilayered. The question of
what category this poem belongs to has a nebulous answer.
The title, while indicative, cannot be used to readily classify
it as a “Love” poem. Furthermore, the fact that it belongs
to a certain category such as “Love” does not imply that it
does not belong to a different category as well, such as “Living”,
nor does it imply whether it belongs to a subcategory
thereof, specifically, the subcategory of “Marriage & Companionship”
(indeed, as we will see, unequivocal single categorization
is rare). Furthermore, is the speaker’s insistent
urge to travel and discover (new?) places actually a facetious
one, as some of his diction strongly suggests, and then
what is the target of his irony? Are possibly capital existential
questions as the one in the penultimate line muffled by
the modern condition of pointless rambling, undiscriminating
consumerism, and chronic disorientation? And where is
the announced love in the “tedious argument” of the alienating
placeless cityscape? The task of determining whether
a poem belongs to any given number of categories and subcategories,
by means of analyzing its lexical content, is the
objective of our work.
[...]

Methodology
Our methodology involves three distinct phases: 1) Determining
the number of categories and subcategories, and their
nature, in which to place each poem; 2) Determine a method
to extract relevant features from each document, and 3) Selecting
an appropriate classifying algorithm.
[...]

Feature Extraction
The content-based nature of the classification task makes it
ideal to use two models to extract features from our corpus:
Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (tf-idf)
as applied to a Bag-of-Words model, and Latent Dirichlet
Allocation (LDA).

[MORE IN THE FORTHCOMING PROCEEDINGS OF THE CONFERENCE]
Check out the full Program of FLAIRS-28 here