Improving Measures of Text Reuse in English Poetry: A TF–IDF Based Method

Text reuse measurement is important for both LIS and literary studies, where it is mainly used to study influence between authors. Although projects such as Tesserae have already adopted computational methods for investigating text reuse in Latin poetry, its potential applications to the rich collections of English poetry have not been realized. This research proposes a modified version of the Tesserae Project’s measure based on the insight embodied in TF–IDF to study English poetry. Using the Irish poet Yeats’ relationship to five English Romantic poets as a test case, three parallel experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the suitability of this method for English poetry. The results show that this new method is effective in measuring text reuse in English poetry, and the TF–IDF based modification is more sensitive to known cases of text reuse than the original method. This method can also be adopted to noncanonical literary works in the future, providing an example of the significance of LIS for digital humanities.