Paradise Explained, Meaning Lost: A Nonsensically Annotated Edition of Milton's Epic

[jrladd]

So I realize I'm a day late, but I promise that I finished all the code yesterday. Just didn't have time to upload it all and add the README until today. The full repo is here.

Paradise Explained, Meaning Lost

A Nonsensically Annotated Edition of Milton's Epic

Annotated editions of complex poetic works often try to decode the poem for the reader. But what if the annotations only caused more confusion?

Beginning with Milton's syntactical complexity as a first premise, this project builds an edition of Paradise Lost split up according to the poem's dazzlingly complicated sentences. The first footnote for each sentences uses spaCy's dependency parsing to create a string of dependency tags that describe the sentence without explaining it.

Description without explanation is the theme of all the following notes, which identify terms in Paradise Lost and attempt to explain those terms using sentences from ConceptNet.

What results is an edition of the poem that in appearance mimics the thorough scholarly edition of the poem published by Longman and edited by Alistair Fowler. But where that edition provides background and explanation, this edition suggests explanatory annotation while only further occluding and complicating the poem.

As a sample for now (and to save my computer from memory issues), I've only processed Book 1, but the resulting text is well over 90,000 words.

[hugovk]

Wow, look at all those footnotes! :)

[enkiv2]

This is wonderful

On Sat, Dec 1, 2018 at 2:32 PM Hugo [email protected] wrote:

Wow, look at all those footnotes! :)

[image: image] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1324225/49332148-5e4db400-f5b0-11e8-8791-346aa65260f2.png

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