Digital Assessment of Conventional Lexical Analysis of the Urdu Marsiya With Sketch Engine Software
Saniya Irfan · 2024
Digital Humanities is a new and developing area that is helping scholars to analyse a much wider set of data. While conventional literary analysis can yield similar readings, computational analysis, with its capacity to unpack extremely complex patterns and to work on large scales, can open up new ways of understanding histories, cultures, texts, performances, literary form, and so forth. Hereof, this work proposes to test the claims of a notable Urdu critic Shibli Nomani’s subjective investigation of Urdu Marsiya through the software Sketch Engine. Sketch Engine is a tool to explore language, primarily designed for text analysis or text mining. It can be employed to scrutinize the text(s) in a non-conventional manner. Shibli Nomani, however, has critically analysed the works of celebrated Urdu Marsiya writers Meer Anees and Mirza Dabeer in a traditional way. The Urdu Marsiya , or elegy, as put forward by Syed Akbar Hyder, has not only rendered the Urdu language literary and poetic beauty, but also been regarded as a medium of religious, cultural, and intellectual expression. This genre encompasses vibrant imagery, Urdu-Persian vocabulary, and a declamatory style (Taht-ul-Lafz). Since the popularity of Marsiya writing or Marsiya Nigari in religious gatherings during the 19th century, the commentaries on prominent poets have been done from a traditional and subjective perspective. In contrast, the present investigation would non-conventionally identify what is typical in the language, and what is rare, unusual, or emerging usage by utilizing Word Frequency, the most widely used feature of the Sketch Engine software. The lists of the frequent words generated from a digital corpus of Marsiya by Meer Anees and Mirza Dabeer, excluding stop words, will then be utilized to assess the lexical repertoire as is observed from the subjective viewpoint of Shibli Nomani.