A computationally-assisted procedure for discovering poetic organization within oral tradition
David Meyer · 2017
A procedure is described which is capable of detecting poetic organization within transcribed oral tradition text.It consists of two components: An automated process which generates recurring n-gram patterns, and a verification process of manual review.Applied to a corpus of Tahitian and Mangarevan oral tradition, it has led to discovery of a variety of uses of meter and parallelism; ranging from the universally common to the unanticipated.The procedure should be generalizable to the study of other of the world's oral poetries, having been designed to identify a wide range of organizational possibilities.