We’re interested in how insects are represented in poetry, especially whether there has been a decline in insect references over time, a change in the complexity of insect references, and/or a change in emotion. We are also looking at which insect taxa are (over)represented in poems and what aspects of their biology seem to inspire people the most. I touched on these ideas earlier this year (see Poems about cockroaches and Broader impacts of insect decline). Here’s a quick update to let you know the project is very much active, and we’re looking for student collaborators. Anyone interested in learning some linguistics methods?
Our primary data set (corpus) is approaching 4,000 haiku, spanning from 1500s to today. We’ve also developed a metric to measure biological complexity, which has been applied to almost half of our corpus. Here’s a look at the preliminary complexity scores of the first 1,400 haiku:
See any trends in overall biological complexity of haiku over time? I don’t. The elements of insect biology most frequently referenced by haiku poets in these 1,400 haiku include:
- habitat (e.g., in a garden, in nature, in people’s houses) – 652 poems
- temporal aspects of insect activity- 251 poems
- flight – 225 poems
- seasonality (not surprising, given the medium!) – 208 poems
- sound production – 183 poems
- color – 123 poems
The elements of insect biology that seem to resonate least with haiku poets so far:
- aposematism – zero poems!
- thorax, genitalia, mouthparts – 1 poem each
- digestion – 2 poems
- hatching, molting, respiration – 3 poems each
We haven’t run the numbers on taxonomic representation, but I can tell already that butterflies, cicadas, and crickets will be overrepresented, relative to their taxonomic diversity. Each hexapod order is represented, I think, except Strepsiptera 🙁 Stay tuned for more updates soon! In the meantime, let me know if you’re interested in collaborating.
As a reward for reading this post, here is one of the two most biologically complex insect haiku we could find:
summer sunset
streetlight moths
in a cobweb
It’s got phenology, temporal data, predator-prey interactions, phototaxis, extended phenotype (of the spider), habitat, and life stage. Exquisite!
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