This project is a course requirement for Computational Methods in the Humanities, taught by David Birnbaum in the Fall semester of 2014 at the University of Pittsburgh
There are two aspects of this project: the mapping and linguistic study.
In the Middle Ages, the Galician-Portuguese lyric was a very important poetic school, since it was the language used in nearly all of Iberia for lyric poetry. Its significance lies in its status as the first cultural production documented in Galicia or Portugal which is not written in Latin and represents not only the beginnings but one of the high points of poetic history in both countries and Medieval Europe. To understand how this poetic school worked it is important to see the relations between the people involved. We want to depict these relations in a map to find out which were the cultural centers of the time, and, therefore, who were the political agents that held them. “Who was boss?” in the High and Late Middle Ages in the Iberian Peninsula is one of the questions we hope to answer. If you want to read more about these poets, visitt the About the poets section
We will be looking at linguistic aspects of this poetic school corpus as well. Using the
time-frame data extracted from the biographical information we used to build the maps,
we will study diachronic variation present in the texts. The research question that will
focus the linguistic study is:
How did the Portuguese pronoun system change throughout the Late Middle Ages?