Welcome to He Do the Police in Different Voices, a website for exploring voices in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. This site takes its name from Eliot’s evocative working title for his poem. Following the lead presented by this title, this site is a resource for exploring fundamental questions about The Waste Land: How many voices are there in the poem? How do these voices differ from one another? Where do the voices switch? Do some voices return? Is there an overarching narrator who “does” all these voices, or are they independent of one another?

The site is divided into three main sections. The first of these sections, “What the Class Said,” presents the answers to some of these questions as arrived at by the Fall 2011 section of the University of Toronto undergraduate English course, “The Digital Text.” Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches, including polling and TEI encoding, the class settled upon a preliminary hypothesis about how many voices there are in the poem, where they switch, and where they return.

This hypothesis is tested using purely quantitative methods in the second section, “What the Computer Said.” This section presents our efforts to develop an algorithm for automatically detecting voice-switches in The Waste Land, and allows visitors to compare what counts as a "voice switch" for a computer and a human.

The third section, “Have Your Own Say,” allows you to provide your own reading of the poem’s voices. Here, in a two-step process, you can indicate every place where you believe one voice gives way to another, and then assign a particular identity to each selected chunk of dialogue. (In the near future, you will be able to listen the poem read to you according to your chosen vocal divisions.) Your input in this section is invaluable, and will be incorporated into future research.

If you wish to learn more the project and its creators—or about Eliot, The Waste Land, and its voices—please see the “About” section.

Development of this site is ongoing. Please report any problems, typos, inaccuracies, etc., to adam.hammond@hedothepolice.org

Note to mobile users: our site navigation bar does not currently work with touch-based displays. Please use the navigation menu you'll find at the bottom of each page. Several features of the site depend on "mouse overs"; for these to function properly, you will need to access it from a computer with a cursor.

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