A computational linguist who began learning Japanese to play a video game. A literary scholar who digitally tracks foreign and fake languages in medieval texts. A 14th-century epic starring an elderly poet who confesses to committing seven deadly sins. A programming language named after a comedy troupe that mocks myths of the Middle Ages.
These are the components of a unique collaboration between two Ursinus scholars studying at the intersection of modern technology and archaic texts, putting an experimental spin on the digital liberal arts.
One might call Alvin C. Grissom II and Kara L. McShane kindred spirits in analyzing textual styles. Grissom, an assistant professor of computer science, uses software to analyze incremental language processing. In a coauthored paper, he revealed ways to speed up simultaneous machine translation. His sly sense of humor is reflected in the paper’s title: “Don’t Until the Final Verb Wait.”
In college, McShane was a disciple of 20th-century British literature until she took a required Middle Ages course on the legends of King Arthur and his roundtable knights. Captivated by the exotic blend of drama, power and flair, she decided to roll back the centuries and become a medievalist. Her parents rewarded her new calling by giving her a copy of the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
It’s no wonder, then, that the linguistic detectives are using Python, a programming language invented by Monty Python fans, to crunch data about topical and thematic patterns in Confessio Amantis (The Lover’s Confession), a 33,000-line poetic treatise by John Gower, the second most famous medieval poet after his good friend, Geoffrey Chaucer.
“We both have a deep and abiding fascination with language, which is part of why we work well together and why this project is a natural fit for both of us,” McShane says.
Grissom adds, “I have been working in machine learning and natural language processing for over a decade, and I’m happy that the technologies our community has developed are being used for forms of literary inquiry. Professor McShane has shown a knack and enthusiasm for applying new technologies to literary inquiry, so in some ways, we’re a perfect match.”
Medievalists have been early adopters of digital tools, and collaboration between medievalists and computer scientists isn’t unprecedented. But while medievalists have tried to use machine reading for these texts, the challenges of inconsistent handwriting, varied dialects and nonstandard spelling have left many medievalists skeptical (or despairing) about what machine reading can tell us about these works.
Programming languages, McShane points out, can detect patterns that can help scholars navigate mazelike manuscripts with a dizzying assortment of sources, styles and spellings. She’s only half-joking when she says Middle English spelling “is optional at best.”
She’s on a mission that she describes as “reinventing the Middle Ages.” McShane is an editor with Medievally Speaking, an open-access review journal, and works with the Gower Project, a consortium dedicated to bold theories produced with new technologies. She also developed a venture on illustrating Chaucer texts sponsored by the Robbins Library Digital Projects, based at the University of Rochester, where she earned her graduate degrees. At Ursinus, she helps run the Digital Liberal Arts working group (see below) and co-teaches Bears Make History, which accesses the college’s archives to promote digital entrepreneurship.
Gower’s first long poem in English, reportedly commissioned by Richard II because he wanted more texts in his kingdom’s native tongue, Confessio Amantis is an early source of standard modern English and is the third-most copied manuscript before the invention of the printing press.
The scholars began by tracking Gower’s terms of emotion: “love,” “lust,” “vice.” The poem, after all, is the extremely emotional pilgrimage of an extremely emotional poet. McShane initially thought it was an unconventional point of departure, given that Gower is generally considered more of a moralist than a romantic. Her skepticism faded as emotion terms unexpectedly produced terms associated with place and location. Typing “rage,” for example, triggered a list of seemingly unrelated words, including “peace,” “star,” “ship” and “water.”
Python introduced them to the idea that Gower regarded water as an emotional force, a raging river of the heart or a tidal wave of the soul. Identifying water as a kind of lifeboat in Confessio Amantis led her to suggest that Gower is not only a spiritual cartographer but an emotional one as well.
Of course, digital scholarship works best when scholars comb manuscripts—originals, copies, reference materials—with their digits.
But McShane says, “What’s exciting to me, at least, is how these tools provide us with new ways to explore questions. New technologies can be both extra eyes—helping us process more text more quickly—and fresh eyes, helping us return to well-known works with a new perspective, which is essential to the work of studying literature.”
In January, the Ursinus professors presented their research at a Gower seminar at the annual Modern Languages Association conference. The project is in its infancy, and McShane and Grissom envision using Python to dissect dialects in other medieval texts, or subjecting medieval texts to automatic translation.
It might be fun, Grissom adds, to program a system that produces Gower-esque poetry.
McShane loves the idea. “I can’t tell you,” she says, “how much fun that would be at parties.”
