Underrepresented Poetry in the United States

Contents: About the Collection | Contributions | References | Tech

About the Collection

This collection features HathiTrust Digital Library’s holdings of 105 selected poetry collection books written by underrepresented groups of poets in the United States. The groups include four different ethnic groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and Latin Americans. Each corpus per group consists of 27 digitized books stored in the HathiTrust Digital Library. Professor Kahyun Choi collected information of the poets from the poetry website, poets.org, which is “produced by the Academy of American Poets, a nonprofit charitable organization” (Academy of American Poets, n.d.)¹. Doctoral student Gyuri Kang annotated poem boundaries and analyzed the poems in a HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) data capsule, which is a “secure computing [environment] for performing researcher-driven text analysis on the HathiTrust corpus” (HathiTrust Research Center [HTRC], n.d.)². Since most of the works are under copyright protection, direct access to the corpora is prohibited. Only for academic purposes, limited access to the corpora is available in a HTRC data capsule. Since most computational studies of American poetry were centered on poems by Caucasian Americans, we chose marginalized groups of American poets to fill the gap by computationally analyzing potential distinctive features of each marginalized group.

Examples of underrepresented poetry collections include but not limited to:

Contributions

This collection is dedicated to amplify marginalized voices in American poetry. We compared the number of poets from underrepresented communities in HathiTrust and poets.org. As viewed in the visualization below, HathiTrust needs more holdings authored by underrepresented poets in comparison to the number of underrepresented poets featured in poet.org.

The HathiTrust holdings represent approximately 321 out of 758 marginalized poets featured in poets.org. Asian, African, and Latin American poets are relatively covered well in both websites. On the other hand, both websites lack in representing Native American and Pacific Islander poets. It is significant to identify a gap among underrepresented groups of poets because a comprehensive view of marginality is necessary for representativeness of each group.

We hope to expand our items and their associated metadata to include other underrepresented groups of American poets since the five groups featured in this collection are not complete and definite. We expect to include more marginlized groups of poets featured in other poetry websites, such as Poetry Foundation.

References