How might modern technology be used to explore and uncover poetry?

The core idea of the tool is to provide an easy interface to compare two versions of the same text side by side and highlight any text that has been added, deleted or changed. The tool was built using Python’s inbuilt module Difflib that allows users to compare sets of data.

Inspiration
Surrounding the work of Mary Wroth, Ilona Bell in her essay The Autograph Manuscript of Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus claimed that Wroth’s original manuscript version of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, was more personal and uncensored, compared to the printed version. The printed version was not just refined and polished, but it was edited strategically and to make it more acceptable to the public - "Wroth's intimate manuscript poems challenge current scholarly paradigms of English Renaissance women, bringing them into consonance with their continental contemporaries." (Bell, pg 172).

La Trobe University has an electronic edition of Wroth’s poetry edited by Paul Salzman that provides a stanza-by-stanza comparison, analysis, and an interpretation of the differences for all the different versions of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. This makes it easier to see the changes and its implications. However, a digital tool that harnesses the power of computation can aid this process and look across much larger corpora of texts. It can assist in effective and efficient “distant reading”.