We are a keen gathering of scholars developing various computing and statistical apparatuses to describe and analyse metre, style and poetics. We entrust them with part of our research to gain in speed and/or power, escape the physical boundaries of what our mind can embrace, rethink the usual questions and address new ones previously out of reach of traditional readings. Statistical analyses, digital corpuses, miscellaneous inventories shed light upon literature and provide our interpretations with the physical evidence they had to do without so far, and they in turn raise hermeneutic challenges.
If you apply, would like to apply, or think one is entitled to apply mechanical devices to the reading of literary – and possibly poetic – texts, if you are keen on databases, text mining, stylometry or computational stylistics, then you are one of our group.
We focus on poetics, metrics, and stylistics, are open to adjacent fields, and try to gather once a year to share our findings and progress. Devices that did not yield the expected results, provided their shortcomings provide an interesting insight, are welcome too.
Anyone sharing our interests is welcome to join the group.
This group was born from the conference organised in Basel in October 2017 by Anne-Sophie Bories (Universität Basel), with the collaboration of Hugues Marchal (Universität Basel) and Gérald Purnelle (Université de Liège), where Franco Moretti and Valérie Beaudouin gave keynote lectures.
A second gathering happened in Berlin in September 2018, in the form of a workshop co-organised by Anne-Sophie Bories and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek (FU Berlin), a third is happening in Nancy in 2019, a conference co-organised by Anne-Sophie Bories and Véronique Montémont (ATILF). The fourth edition, planned in Prague in 2020, and to be co-organised by Petr Plecháč (Czech Academy of Sciences), Robert Kolár (Czech Academy of Sciences) and Anne-Sophie Bories, unfortunately had to be canceled due to the covid19 pandemic.
A fifth Plotting Poetry conference was hosted in Tartu, Estonia, organised by Mari Sarv, Maria-Kristiina Lotman, Susanna Mett, Anne-Sophie Bories, Pablo Ruiz Fabo and Petr Plecháč on 4-6 July 2022. It was a thrill to be meeting again with familiar and new faces, in person.
The sixth edition of Plotting Poetry was held on 12-13-14 June, 2023 in Budapest, Hungary, organised by Levente Seláf, Margit Kiss, Anne-Sophie Bories, Pablo Ruiz Fabo and Petr Plecháč, with a focus on The Plot: Storytelling in verse.
For the seventh edition of Plotting Poetry, we returned to Switzerland, this time in the village of Einsiedeln, with Anne-Sophie Bories, Nils Couturier, Petr Plecháč and Pablo Ruiz Fabo as co-organisers, and worked on the theme Metres of Humour.
The eighth Plotting Poetry conference will take place in Prague in June 2025, finally making up for the Czech edition cancelled during the covid19 pandemic. This year, our theme will be Skeletons in the closet, and the organisers are Anne-Sophie Bories, Neža Kočnik, Robert Kolár, Petr Plecháč, Pablo Ruiz Fabo and Artjoms Šeļa.
Steering committee
