Texts

Every poem in the archive can be read in two complementary ways. The default Contexts view shows the poem alongside a knowledge graph of the people, places, works, and contextualisations connected to it. The Structure view (also called the Text-as-Graph view) turns the poem itself into a graph, exposing its formal architecture: stanzas, lines, words, rhyme, and metre. A single text can thus be read structurally as well as semantically. The structural model draws on the POSTDATA poetic-analysis ontology (OntoPoetry).

Structure view

A segmented control at the top-left of the graph panel switches between the two views:

  • Contexts (shown by default): the poem's entity graph of authors, works, expressions, places, time-spans, and contextualisations.
  • Structure: the poem rendered as a reading-order graph of its own parts.

In the Structure view a poem is modelled from the top down, as whole poem, then stanza, then line, then words. The whole poem is a dashed container node; each stanza is a box that, where the encoding allows, is captioned with its rhyme scheme, rhyme disposition, and metrical type (for example Stanza 1 (ABAB; alternate)). Every line is shown in full, with a coloured border keyed to its rhyme and a short caption giving its rhyme letter and syllable count (for example [a · 10 syll]). Tapping a line, a stanza, or the whole-poem node fans out its words and punctuation in exact reading order; tapping the background collapses everything again.

If a text has not yet been analysed for structure (for instance a prose passage or an unanalysed fragment), the panel says so rather than drawing an empty graph.

Form and prosody

The Structure view renders a poem's prosody directly onto the graph:

  • Rhyme: shown as coloured line borders drawn from a stable, poem-local palette, and as curved rhyme-weave arcs linking the lines within a stanza that share a rhyme. The toolbar carries a Rhyme legend of coloured chips; click a chip to spotlight the lines of that rhyme and dim the rest, and click it again to clear.
  • Metre: revealed by the show metre checkbox, which appends a scansion ribbon to each line using the archive's notation (˘ for an unstressed syllable, ′ for a stressed one, | for a foot boundary, || for a caesura). Where the feet are regular, the line is also named, for example iambic pentameter.
  • Syllabic deviation: lines whose syllable count differs from the poem's most common count are drawn with a double border, making metrical irregularities easy to spot.

Exploring and contributing

The toolbar above the graph offers several ways to move through a poem:

  • expand all / collapse all: fan out (or fold away) the words of every line at once.
  • tour ▸: a guided, stanza-by-stanza walk through the poem, where each click spotlights the next stanza.
  • fit: re-centre and re-fit the graph.
  • View: where a work has more than one text (for example an original and its translations), a selector switches the Structure view between them, keeping the linear text tabs in step.

Hovering a line or word in either the linear poem or the graph highlights the matching element in the other, so the two representations stay linked as you read. The contexts ▸ button overlays any contextualisations already attached to the poem: nodes carrying a context show a small count badge, and hovering a badge outlines every passage that context touches. Contexts that apply to the whole poem appear in a separate poem-level pill.

The Structure view is also a starting point for contributing. Right-click (or long-press) any node, whether a stanza, line, word, or the whole poem, to open the contribution flow with that element pre-filled as the anchor of a new context. Contributing requires a signed-in account (see How to contribute a context).

Networks

The Networks view is an approximation of contextuality as a theory of space. It facilitates the exploration of the RPPA knowledge base in form of a network graph and aims to strike a balance between the necessities of spatial and temporal situatedness of contextuality and the freedom to explore formal, semantic, poetic, as well as network-analytical measures in the underlying knowledge base. Contextuality supplements the temporal axis of textual reception with contextual connectivity in space. The spatial dimension allows for a full appreciation of a text's complexities in a space that connects all parts of a text among themselves and shows exits and pathways to its contexts. Only in this space can a real interpretation of a text unfold: as texts invite dialogue and contextualisation, the interpretative space grows with it.

Methodology

Contextuality is spatially and temporally situated, meaning that each context carries place and moment that shape interpretation. In RPPA this requires:

  • Spatial anchoring — linking contexts to specific locations (birthplaces, performance sites, publication or translation events);
  • Temporal anchoring — recording dates, periods, and historical horizons that affect meaning;
  • Integrated modelling — representing contexts as graph nodes with spatial and temporal attributes so analyses can traverse both dimensions.

Contexts themselves have a historical place and function that is linked to in the space of the context, thus the text enters this realm of the contexts' universe while at the same time the context transforms our understanding, reading, representation, and overal model of the text. All contextuality is therfore minimally bi-directional, it facilitates a spatial movement between text and context, i.e. the text's place in the context's reach through time and space is just as important as the work it performs in the text.

This temporal/spatial expansion historicises a text as a ‘global text‘, i.e. contexts embed texts in multidimensional spaces and connect texts more broadly via shared contexts. As such, the global text evolves from the countless recontextualisations of the text (every reading adds a layer to this space), and hence serves as a representative model of the text in its contextualised state, it extends and ultimately replaces the textual discourse with an open-ended, context-based network, or graph.

Graph display

The RPPA knowledge graph can be explored in any user-defined direction. Nodes can be added to the network using either the graph search function or by expanding existing nodes by adding their connected (incoming and outgoing) nodes. Nodes can also be dragged to change the graph layout, and the graph as a whole can be zoomed in and out of to reposition the graph display.

The nodes in the RPPA knowledge graph are coded by colour and shape to indicate their class (type) and ontological contexts. Nodes labels comprise the class of node, followed by a brief descriptive label; edge labels show the property label only. An overview of a node's properties is displayed next to the node on hover and in the Graph information panel on the right when clicking on a node.

Double click on works, expressions, contexts, actualizations, or interrelations at any time to bring up detailed content views.

Colours

  • Authors
    • Birth
    • Death
    • Creation/Production
  • Works
    • Expression #1
    • Expression #2
    • Expression #3
    • Expression #4
  • Places
  • Time-Spans
  • Languages
  • Contextuality
  • SKOS vocabularies

Shapes

Browse by concept

Beneath the graph search box, the Browse by concept panel lists the concepts actually used to annotate the corpus, grouped under subject headings (motifs, symbols, genres, forms, and so on). Each heading reports how many concepts and annotations it holds; expanding it reveals the individual concepts as chips, each with a count of the annotations that use it. Clicking a concept seeds the graph with it, surfacing its cross-vocabulary equivalents and the works it annotates. The panel is usage-driven and refreshes as new contexts are contributed, so its coverage grows with the archive. It is a live, counted counterpart to the vocabulary list below.

Graph traversal

On right-click (or click and hold) in the graph display, a context wheel is displayed with these options:

  • – add incoming/outgoing connections (when on a node)
  • – undo last change
  • – redo last change
  • – log node

Individual selected nodes can be deleted with the delete key. Press Ctrl + Z/Y to undo/redo any changes to the graph.

Grouping, faceting, and export

A control panel at the top-right of the graph lets you pivot and tidy the network without leaving it. Under Grouping:

  • Group by: cluster the nodes by a chosen facet. Facets are organised into origin properties (language, composition or publication decade, residence, nationality, continent, birth decade), semantic properties (concept, vocabulary), and reach properties (the country or period a context reaches), alongside general facets such as node type and gender. Each value-group is wrapped in a soft coloured hull and listed, with its member count, in the legend. The Networks graph opens grouped by language.
  • collapse passages: on by default, this hides the intermediary passage nodes and links contexts straight to their works, so the graph reads work-to-work. Switch it off to see the passages again.
  • aggregate large groups: on by default, this folds any group of more than twelve members into a single count-node labelled, for example, 60 · English, keeping the graph legible. Click a count-node to expand it back into its members; the change is always reversible.

The Layout section redraws the graph, and Export saves the current network as GraphML, Cytoscape JSON, or a PNG image for reuse in your own analyses.

Ontologies and vocabularies

Contextuality is not limited to intertextual or intermedial relations — it also encompasses social, material, spatial and institutional factors that shape how texts are produced, transmitted and read. RPPA models these dimensions using a mix of established ontologies and project-specific vocabularies to ensure consistent contextualisation and linked-data interoperability.

  • Core semantic standards: Dublin Core, FOAF, schema.org and SKOS for metadata and concept organisation;
  • Geographic and temporal: GeoNames, WGS84 and ISO date/time vocabularies for places and time-spans;
  • Linguistic and classification: ISO language codes and SKOS-based thesauri for language and domain classification;
  • RPPA ontologies: project-specific RDF models (drawing on the CIDOC-CRM, POSTDATA, and INTRO ontologies) describing nodes (works, expressions, agents, contexts), properties and contextual relations; exposed via a SPARQL endpoint for querying and graph export.

RPPA context vocabularies

To support the modelling of intertextual, intratextual, and typological contexts, RPPA has produced a number of SKOS vocabulaires drawing on established dictionaries, encyclopedias, and glossaries from among others literature, poetry, art, and music. Below is a complete list of the vocabularies currently available for classifying the contextualisations of intertextual and intermedial contextuality in RPPA. The task of creating and offering high-quality domain-specific vocabularies in support of RPPA's contextualisation effort is ongoing. We will be adding new vocabularies periodically, including but not limited to art, music, theatre, sciences, history, religion, philosophy, and mythology. Please feel free to suggest additional vocabularies to be included. Clicking on any of the terms/concepts below will show them in their contextualised form in the Networks view.

These vocabularies allow RPPA to support rich, multi-dimensional contextualisations, enable graph-based discovery, and facilitate reuse across digital humanities tools.

Open Scholarship

Thanks to the nature of Romanticism as a global phenomenon, reading global Romanticism will more often than not be reading in translation (i.e. distantly). Additionally, ‘global texts‘ are 'open texts', they invite readers to participate in their creation. Finally, a database of contextuality like RPPA's constitutes a corpus of a higher order (a network) that is in itself a valuable object of study beyond the concrete work contexts perform in the texts. Taken together, it is only through collaboration and participation that all of these challenges can be addressed:

  • subject and domain expertise of poetic traditions within and across national literatures;
  • comparatist approaches to look beyond the artistic aspects to the expression of broader literary and cultural trends, mapping it onto the evolution of forms, genres, and ideas/motifs;
  • computational approaches from ontological modelling to network analysis and mapping approaches.

How to contribute a context

Any authenticated user can add contextual knowledge directly from a poem page. Look for the icon in the poem header — clicking it opens the contribution form. The process takes three steps:

  1. Connect to RPPA — Sign in with your ORCID, Google, or Facebook account using the Connect button in the top navigation bar. Authentication is handled securely via OAuth 2.0 and RPPA never stores your password.
  2. Navigate to a poem — Go to any full-text poem page. Once signed in, the icon becomes active in the poem header. You can try this with Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”, for example.
  3. Add a context — Click the icon to open the contribution panel, select a context type (intertextual, intratextual, typological), specify the text anchors, and fill in the details of your contextualisation. When you are done, click "Add Context". Your contribution is immediately attributed to you by name and is citable as a micro-publication under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence.

Contexts become part of RPPA’s knowledge graph and are discoverable through the network and map visualisations. If you have questions or would like guidance before contributing, please get in touch.

Maps

The historical map used in the visualisation is John Arrowsmith's The World, on Mercators Projection (London: J. Arrowsmith, 1844). While the original map centres on the Pacific region, it is Western/Northern-centric in other ways, not least with regard to its place of manufacture and its Mercartor projection. For geo-referencing purposes the map has been aligned with the Web Mercator projection, the de facto standard for maps on the web.

Poets are shown at their place of birth, unless it is unknown or the poet is generally associated with a country other than their birth country, in which case they are shown at the country's geographical centre. Images of the poets have been sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

Markers and the poet network

A Markers | Graph control at the top-right of the map switches between two overlays on the same canvas. Markers (the default) shows each poet as a pin at their location. Graph replaces the pins with a network of poets projected onto the map: every poet sits at their real coordinate and stays anchored there as you pan and zoom. Switching between the two keeps your current position and zoom, so you never lose your place.

Poets appear as small round portraits sourced from Wikimedia Commons, the same images used by the markers. Hovering a poet shows their name. A single click opens the poet's profile in the sidebar; a double click reveals their connections (see below). Where several poets share the same location they stack on a single point: click the stack to fan them out into rings so you can pick an individual, and click empty space to collapse the fan again.

As on the network graph, a Colour by control tints the poets by nationality, continent, birth decade, or gender, drawing a soft hull around each group, and a Redraw button re-seeds the graph and clears any connection lines. The base map can now be zoomed in more deeply, and a layers control at the bottom-right switches between the modern OpenStreetMap base and the historical 1844 overlay.

Connection layers

Double-clicking a poet in the Graph view draws lines to the other poets they are connected to. Four independently toggleable layers, each a different colour, control which kinds of connection are shown (all are on by default):

  • Shared themes & concepts (blue): poets whose works share at least two of the same content concepts, such as motifs, topics, symbols, subjects, or genres.
  • Shared form & metre (green): poets sharing at least two of the same formal or metrical categories, such as metre, stanza type, rhyme scheme, or poetic form.
  • Intertextual allusion (orange): poets directly linked by a recorded intertextual relation between their works, such as an allusion, imitation, or reply.
  • References (purple, with an arrowhead): a poet whose poem writes about another poet. This layer is directional, the arrow pointing from the referring poet to the poet written about, tracing lines of reception (for example Pushkin and Heine pointing to Byron).

Where a pair of poets is joined by more than one kind of connection, the lines are fanned apart so each layer stays legible. If a poet has no recorded connections yet, a brief message says so.

Mapping global Romantic-period poetry

Primarily conceived as a visual access point at the moment, our aim is to use maps and mapping as an analytical tool that facilitates multi-perspectival approaches, mitigates ambiguity and uncertainty, helps to consider and appreciate the evolution of national literatures and literary spaces alongside the world literary space portrayed on the world canvas, and benefits from the participatory nature of RPPA to arrive at more useful representations.

Over time, as the networks of contextuality on the world canvas become more apparent, we envision the emergence of dynamic maps at a higher levels of detail. We expect these to reveal more contexts and the inner- as well as extra-literary structures that underpin and facilitate the construction of global texts and will allow for a more detailed representation and analysis of their components and evolution.

As we map out, literally and figuratively spoken, the poetry of the global Romantic period, we address not only its temporal challenges, but also embrace the geographic, linguistic, and cultural diversity of the various stages of a global artistic phenomenon. We hope that by virtue of the project's historical focus on the Romantic period, its comparative focus on contextuality and the building of global texts, and its collaborative and participatory nature, the map can be useful as an emerging historical canvas for the poetry of the global Romantic period.

Known issues

Regretfully, for navigational purposes, country names and borders used in the map navigation correspond to present-day denominations and historical reality. We apologise for the resulting distortion and historical inaccuracy, and hope to improve this over time with the help of projects like OpenHistoricalMap as they evolve and mature.

Further reading

Query

RPPA participates in the Semantic Web of literatures and literary studies and contributes to the wider knowledge base on the global Romantic period. Its use of computational methods as well as peer contributions to contextualise large multi-lingual corpora with regard to both form and content aims at arriving at a global network of contexts. This network facilitates model-building that can lead to insights about the historical and geographic dynamics of the network, resulting in a knowledge base of the period that can be re-used, queried and combined with related digital scholarship, and that facilitates further enquiry. To this end, RPPA provides access to its knowledge base via a public SPARQL endpoint, which powers the RPPA Query Service.

Access to the RPPA knowledge base

  • SPARQL:
    The RPPA knowledge base is hosted on the PRISMS OpenScholarship platform and is accessible via a dedicated RPPA SPARQL endpoint <https://data.prisms.digital/query/rppa/sparql>. The endpoint is a deployment of Apache Jena Fuseki, which supports the SPARQL 1.1 Query Language and content negotiation for the following content types with SELECT queries: text/csv, text/plain, application/sparql-results+json, and application/sparql-results+xml (URL parameter ?format=csv|text|json|xml). The RPPA SPARQL endpoint currently employs the Wikibase Query Service GUI, but you should be able to use any SPARQL GUI, e.g. Yasgui, with the above endpoint URI.
  • RDF dumps:
    RDF dumps of the entire RPPA graph (currently updated weekly) are made available in N-Quads format:
    RPPA-RDFdump@latest.nq.gz ( @latest=2026-08-02T04:35:01Z )
    Citation suggestion: RPPA RDF dump, www.romanticperiodpoetry.org, Huber Digital, 16 Dec 2025, https://www.romanticperiodpoetry.org/data/dumps/RPPA-RDFdump2025-12-16T09:44:46Z.nq.gz

Contact

Get in touch

This is an open invitation to academics, research projects, digital archives and repositories, and anyone with an interest in the literature of the Romantic period in any discipline to collaborate on RPPA. The project looks forward to welcoming partners at any stage to discuss collaboration or other forms of participation. Please do not hesitate to reach out, there are many ways to contribute and all of them are valued and appreciated:

Romantic Period Poetry Archive (RPPA)
Alexander Huber, Editor