With my former student McKinsey Kemeny, I have an article in Contemporary Literature 64.4 (2024): “‘Not “Normal”’: A Distant Approach to Reading Carol Ann Duffy’s First Five Collections.” (Note to self: try to avoid titling articles with quotations that include scare quotes as the levels of punctuation it produces starts to resemble Danielewski’s The Fifty Year Sword.) Given the strictures on publishing in print, we’ve needed to move both our full acknowledgments and some images to the Web.
Acknowledgments
This essay was written collaboratively by Brian Croxall and McKinsey Kemeny (née Koch) during June, July, and August 2019 and February, March, and April 2020. We wrote together as teacher and student in a sort of synecdochal representation of the work that has taken place in six different classrooms over eight years. As the culmination of a research project that originated in the classroom and that has been collaborative since the beginning, this essay owes debts to many. First and foremost are the students in the many classes that Croxall has taught, who each year asked whether he would credit them if he ever wrote about the project. These students are
- Fall 2011 at Emory University: Candice Bang, Martin Benn, Reza Bhiwandiwalla, Michael Bolleter, Jessica Coons, Daniel Crispino, Ani Deshpande, Joe Dixon, Chelsea Edwards, Reina Factor, Rafid Kasir, Jessica Lee, Jordan Lewis, Peter Marcinkowski, Jordan Nissensohn, Lisa Park, Taylor Pershing, Tarun Ramayya, Zach Sold, Brittany Stouddemire, and Tim Webber;
- Spring 2014 at Emory University: Jacob Albrecht, Daniella Bloch, Nathan Briones, Celia Curtis, Connor Dillman, Jeffrey Dillon, Andrew Drumm, Tiffany Gesang, Angelica Gonzales, Adriti Gulati, Shilpa Jhol, Omair Kazi, Eryn Levine, Abe Lim, Mitchell Lo, Matt O’Connor, Heba Qureshi, Cara Stechmann, Dennis Valerstain, Jonathan Weiss, and Saier Zeng;
- Spring 2015 at Emory University: Maida Ahmad, Hana Ahmed, Joyce Au, Caroline Adams, David An, Savannah Bacon, Elyssa Brezel, Matt Casseday, Nancy Chung, Ashley Glenn, John Keuler, Lily Kronfeld, Daniel Lim, Justine Nurse-McLeod, Erin Penney, Brandon Pownall, Abby Schreiber, Nicholas She, Noreen Siddiqi, Jayme Smith, Hannah Teetor, and Ben Woodworth;
- Fall 2017 at Brigham Young University: Sadie Anderson, Paul Bunker, Kelly Burdick, Maddie Calder, Shelbi Davidson, Chris Dichmann, Miles Farnsworth, Elizabeth Harper, Mike Kim, Alex Lyman, Liz Pickrell, Stephen Rackleff, Tara Sampson, Clarissa Thiriot, Amanda Vite, and Dane Whitaker;
- Winter 2018 at Brigham Young University: Maddie Calder, Chris Dichmann, Lorin Groesbeck, and McKinsey Kemeny;
- Winter 2019 at Brigham Young University: Maika Kagawa Bahr, Dallyn Giles, and Timothy Mabey.
Students in the 2011, 2014, 2015, and 2017 classes participated with Croxall in creating digital editions of Duffy’s work through hand transcriptions of individual poems. Students in the 2018 and 2019 classes participated with Croxall in correcting those hand transcriptions and encoding the corpus in XML.
What’s more, Duffy’s letter to Peter Jay was originally brought to Croxall’s attention by a subset of students in the two sections of his Spring 2009 course “Poetry” at Emory University: Alexandra Adair, Alice Chen, Diana Fridlyand, Seema Jabbar, Kyle Korelishn, Andrew Mulhall, Zach Roward, and Myung-Keun Shim. These students investigated Duffy’s archive as part of an assignment and presented what they found. That assignment was adapted from one designed by Croxall’s good friend and colleague Sarah A. Peterson.
Prior to the Fall 2011 class, Croxall discussed the assignment with Elizabeth Chase, then Coordinator for Research Services at Emory’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Books Library, which would become the Stuart A. Rose Library. Our recent research was greatly assisted by Rose Library staff—particularly Courtney Chartier and Gabrielle M. Dudley—who answered questions about Duffy’s papers and the Library’s acquisitions of them. Joseph Fritsch helped with subsequent research in Duffy’s materials in the Rose Library.
Croxall had numerous conversations with both Lisa Marie Rhody and Natalie M. Houston about distant reading poetry over the years. Rhody kindly joined the Winter 2018 class remotely to discuss the problems of stopwords within poetry. Houston graciously read a draft of the artice, as did Stephen Ramsay. Lauren F. Klein also joined the 2018 class remotely to talk about the politics of distant reading a feminist poet.
Finally, Elli Mylonas created the first template for encoding Duffy’s poetry in XML and answered many of Croxall’s technical questions about TEI. She also met remotely with the 2018 and 2019 classes to discuss XML encoding.
Images
The article originally contained screenshots from Voyant Tools’ MicroSearch. But given the need for images in print to be of a certain resolution and the impossibility of getting such resolution from screenshots, the journal and we agreed to move those images here.
Click on the image to see a larger version of it.
