Professor of English Emerita Patricia O'Neill presented her work on "Poetry and Computers" at the National Humanities Center in June. The week-long institute gathered scholars from the United States and Europe to review projects and methodologies in digital humanities
O'Neill presented her research on sentiment analysis in the ghazal. She collaborated with four senior computer science concentrators in Professor of Computer Science Stu Hirshfield's seminar last fall to develop a machine learning program that would "read" hundreds of couplets in order to measure the degree of "longing" in poems by traditional ghazal writers and contemporary American poets including former Hamilton professor Agha Shahid Ali's ghazals in English.
