Communications of the ACM
Technology nlocks a Secret About a 10th Century Poem
Wheaton College English Professor Michael Drout applies computer analysis to literary research.
Credit: WBUR
With the help of computer analysis, a team of student at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., has uncovered a 1,200-year-old secret about an Old English poem: English Professor Michael Drout's summer research students discovered this month that the author of the 10th century poem "Christ III" created the work not out of whole cloth, as previously believed, but by dividing an older poem into two pieces and then inserting new material in the middle. This discovery led the scholars to further insights about the nature of the historic text.
"Using computer programs written by Wheaton students and techniques developed at Wheaton over the past four summers, the team was able to figure out what was sitting on an anonymous author's desk over a millennium ago," Drout says. "We determined that the unknown author had a written source, that it was in the form of poetry rather than prose, and that the source was already old when our author adapted it."
Wheaton students helped build the cutting-edge software that enables them to analyze the frequency, distribution, and arrangement of words in patterns. The team reached these conclusions by using an original methodology they call Lexomics, which refers to the use of computer programs to conduct statistical analyses of text, employing cluster analysis and other techniques, and in a sense treating a written text as a genome.
Drout and Mark LeBlanc, professor of computer science, joined forces four years ago to find ways to apply computer analysis to literary research. The pair began to lead student researchers in the dissection of many ancient texts, including some of Shakespeare's works as well as the epic poem Beowulf.
Drout is recognized internationally for his work on several Beowulf and J.R.R. Tolkien-related academic projects: he is the creator of the world's most comprehensive database of works about the author; he has worked closely with academic colleagues internationally to establish Tolkien Studies, a scholarly journal based at Wheaton College; and he worked for several years editing long-lost Tolkien Beowulf & the Critics manuscripts for the writer's estate. He is also editor of the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, published in 2006.
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