Florida man abroad. Lapsed Catholic, vulgar marxist, phd’d
@StanfordEnglish
, Asst Prof of Digital Humanities
@CamDigHum
. I compute and write on literary history
I'm excited to share a new publication of mine, "Computing Koselleck: Modelling Semantic Revolutions, 1720–1960", in a new book from Cambridge UP edited by Pete de Bolla, "Explorations in the Digital History of Ideas." (DM me if you can't access the PDF.)
This is far worse than whatever people think China may be doing with Tik Tok data. Meta is likely sharing WhatsApp group membership data with the IDF, which their 'Lavender' AI targeting system then uses to assassinate its members (and their families via its "Where's Daddy?" AI).
🚨BREAKING: TIES BETWEEN WHATSAPP AND LAVENDER - META ASSISTING ISRAEL BY LEAKING DATA?
Accusations suggest Meta, via WhatsApp, may share user group metadata, potentially aiding Israeli military targeting in Gaza.
Despite WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption claim, concerns about
Proud to have been part of the team that computationally analyzed the New York Times' biased coverage of Israel and Palestine. This is part of a broader effort by Writers Against the War On Gaza
@wawog_now
, who released today a tour-de-force exposé of NYT:
The US is a glorified arms dealer. Not enough attention is paid to the capitalist motive behind Biden's continued "aid" and arms sales, both of which enrich US arms manufacturers enormously.
Watch Biden's press secretary squirm to backtrack on accidentally saying the word "Palestine." Some commitment to a two-state solution, when you can't even name the second state whose existence you're allegedly promoting.
What happens when you tell a computer to scan lines of poetry for their meter, except you sneak in lines of prose, too? You end up quantifying "anti-metricality," a text's resistance to scansion. This resistance, and the metrical distance between verse and prose, has a history.
@ProfDBernstein
@wawog_now
Here are some numbers showing that the # of credible antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents are roughly equal in the US since the war—yet NYT covered antisemitism 5x as frequently.
Great stats here from
@cbystarlight
. If you take ADL records of antisemitic (not antizionist/antiwar) incidents, you get roughly the same # as # of Islamophobic incidents from CAIR (3300 to 3500).
But
@nytimes
covered antisemitism 5x as often as Islamophobia (309 articles to 58)
Big news! I'm headed back to the U-nited States to join the tight-knit team of brilliant ppl
@PrincetonDH
. I'll be Research Software Engineer, working w them, faculty & students on a variety of DH projects, as well as continuing my own research. 🤩 I'll be living in Philly. hmu!
We’re very pleased to share the news that Ryan Heuser (
@quadrismegistus
) will be joining us as our new Research Software Engineer
#RSEng
.
Look for a feature on our website introducing him in more detail in a couple of weeks!
@yayfreire
@wawog_now
Our data is originally from Gaza Health Ministry and UNRWA, available online at the Humanitarian Data Exchange:
…
But you're right, these counts of the people murdered and wounded in Gaza are likely vastly undercounting. This is from Reuters on Dec 22:
you know there's also a One Body Problem because it's just so exhausting sometimes to go through academia and not have a dedicated person in this world to help you through the muck and the mire and the stress and the confusion and the uncertainty and the meaninglessness of it all
Before the new academic job season starts, here’s the numbers for 2020-21, as gleaned from jobs listed on the Academic Jobs Wiki under “English literature” or “Ethnic studies” during that and previous academic years. Overall, like every year since 2017, it was the worst year yet.
Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season.
The number of jobs advertised in English Lit (on the Academic Jobs Wiki) is at an all time low: less than half of what it was this time last November. Like last year, the only subfield not plummeting is Ethnic Studies.
(Note: # for 2020 only counts ads posted as of 11/23/2020.)
Great stats here from
@cbystarlight
. If you take ADL records of antisemitic (not antizionist/antiwar) incidents, you get roughly the same # as # of Islamophobic incidents from CAIR (3300 to 3500).
But
@nytimes
covered antisemitism 5x as often as Islamophobia (309 articles to 58)
Proud to have been part of the team that computationally analyzed the New York Times' biased coverage of Israel and Palestine. This is part of a broader effort by Writers Against the War On Gaza
@wawog_now
, who released today a tour-de-force exposé of NYT:
The mistake of my career was doing distant reading. Why? Because it’s distant. The amount of research & reading & contextualisation & historicisation & argumentation it requires is just too much for one person, especially in early career. Don’t do it. If you do DH, stay focussed.
What I miss about writing in coffee shops, alongside the ambient humanity of it, is how the presence of other people patrols your body, forces you to stay still. In a coffee shop, you can't just get up, roam around, mutter to yourself, moan, lie down in despair. It'd be impolite.
I've accepted a new position, finally solving a yearslong 2 body problem. As of this week I am Sr Research Software Engineer at
@kingsdigitallab
in
@KingsCollegeLon
. Looking forward to collaborating on some great digital humanities projects here. And if you're ever in London, hmu
Computational Keywords, or Modern Abstractions: Using computational semantics to find which abstract nouns changed the most in meaning during the transition into modernity. (= DH work I'm doing now in my dissertation on abstraction in 18th-century literature.)
Just posted the talk I gave last week to King's College, with the text synced to the slides:
It's a summary of my dissertation work on abstract language in the novel, and explains how that work addresses “immateriality,” the official topic of my postdoc.
Working on scraping the Academic Jobs Wiki to see if it can yield more accurate recent job numbers. Here's what I've got so far. Note that all subfields are declining in jobs besides Ethnic Studies.
The "99% missles were intercepted" is misleading. All drones (9h to reach Israel) were intercepted; nearly all cruise missles (2h); and allegedly *none* of the 7 hypersonic missles (just *12 minutes*). The attack was not meant to escalate but was def a demonstration of capability
For my chapter on personification, I'm exploring ways machine learning can help us trace the 'human likeness' of non-human nouns across history. Given only which verbs a noun like 'nation' is a subject or object of, how human-like does the noun appear to the model?
The fact that this has been happening for months now—ordinary Israeli citizens blocking aid trucks from entering Gaza—while the Israeli gov't does nothing to stop it, is already evidence enough of genocidal intent. Israel is explicitly allowing Gaza to starve.
Feels strange to post about work stuff, but in my self-quarantine I'm working on more historical semantics for : trying to characterize the types of semantic change undergone by certain keywords across the 19th and 20th centuries.
Wow, definitely check this out.
@benmschmidt
basically just created a new form of rhetoric for DH, one that leads you by the hand through both a story of research and a sea of data—simultaneously.
@ProfDBernstein
@wawog_now
Correction, the numbers are even starker: with 1.75x as many Islamophobic as antisemitic incidents IRL since the war, and 5x the amount of coverage given to antisemitism in NYT, antisemitism appears ~10x more often than Islamphobia in NYT than it does IRL.
@cbystarlight
@nytimes
Correction: 3300 antisemitic incidents from ADL is *without* removing antizionist/antiwar incidents. Removed, it's 2000.
So compared with 3500 Islamophobic incidents from CAIR, there are 1.75 Islamophobic incidents per antisemitic one.
bay area comrades! come join us in front of the ICE HQ in SF at 630 Sansome St to protest kids being ripped screaming from their parents’ arms and put into cages as part of a new official federal policy because wtf this is our country now
We ought to talk more about how reading is, physically speaking, a pain in the ass. It hurts my back, neck, arms, chest, eyes; keeps me shifting from one position to another, lying, standing, pacing, sitting. It’s manual, not just intellectual work (or am I just getting old?).
Biden is going to pull us into war, after having spent 6 months supporting and arming an active genocide. This is worse than my worst nightmare about what a Trump presidency would be.
I just met with my national security team for an update on Iran’s attacks against Israel. Our commitment to Israel’s security against threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad.
Depressed. World is in free fall to climate collapse, nothing is being done. I’m 35yo, never had a permanent job, just got rejected for 2. Don’t know what continent I’ll be on when my visa expires, can’t place roots. Hard to look forward, it’s just fog, smoke, oncoming traffic.
Reading
@Ted_Underwood
's brilliant new book, which I would call elegantly sublime--distilling an entire decade of work at the forefront of distant reading into short, playful, luminous chapters which give us a whole new vision of modern literary history. It's field-defining work.
Is there any work on how much of literary criticism (maybe humanities scholarship more broadly) is just a kind of metaphysical aesthetics? Critics love to 'nuance', find 'interstitial' spaces, locate 'complex series of negotiations', pretend to see 'subversive' qualities, etc.
@benmschmidt
@johannawinant
@ARoseCasey
Ran the numbers for History myself since I was nervous that weird idiosyncrasies I ran into for English Lit might crop up here, but I got largely similar results.
Simply *describing* your data so thickly and with enough examples that new critical meanings emerge from the pressure is an underrated methodology in computational DH.
@Brian__Basinger
@ProfDBernstein
@wawog_now
Yet the ADL numbers are widely known to be manipulated themselves, so something must be done to make the numbers credible and comparable. See e.g.:
Experimenting with mapping character networks. I tagged the speech interactions over Homer's Odyssey along with where-ish they take place, and visualized them on a map and as a social network. In Homer, home is origin, destination, & gravitational center, but in ancient novel: +
This is the first example I've seen of how GPTs could be used to discover literary facts in a corpus of real literature (rather than generate silly poems, etc). Imagine being able to graph the results of these answers across historical corpora of detective stories.
It's cool that
#ChatGPT
can write bad poems, but given an API you could also use it to ask specific content-analysis questions about 100,000 documents. Here I gave it a Sherlock Holmes story and asked a) what's the central mystery b) who's the villain and c) what's their motive?
We need to start a spreadsheet collecting these. Part-of-speech based analysis of passive voice is no match for these new lab-grown passive constructions.
Posting this so I stop working on it.
* Cadence is a new python package for metrical and rhythmic parsing of both verse and prose. Only English so far:
* Try out its underlying metrical parser, Prosodic, on a web interface here:
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I would’ve gotten a PhD even if I knew I would never get a job. It’s paid 5-6 years (in the US) to read, think, write. That said, I still want a job, and I still think that market collapse and casualisation are abominable, and we need to organise.
The House just passed a bill that cements genocide as official US policy. The legislation gives Israel $3.8 billion in weapons, sanctions UNRWA as Palestinians starve, and defunds a UN investigation into Israel's violations of international law.
All but 22 Democrats voted for it
@VicInTremont
@wawog_now
1. # Antisemitic/Islamophobic credible incidents roughly same ( )
2. Palestin*+Gaza* still always less than Israel*. We didn't lump Hamas bc Palestinians/Gazans aren't Hamas
3. We looked for all source nationalities, American Israeli Palestinian were top 3.
Great stats here from
@cbystarlight
. If you take ADL records of antisemitic (not antizionist/antiwar) incidents, you get roughly the same # as # of Islamophobic incidents from CAIR (3300 to 3500).
But
@nytimes
covered antisemitism 5x as often as Islamophobia (309 articles to 58)
Two character-spaces in Austen's Sense and Sensibility, visualized. Which words are more likely to appear within the character-space of Elinor ("sense"), and which in the character-space of Marianne ("sensibility")? An experiment using
@dbamman
's BookNLP ()
As we head into new decade, what are folks' sense of the cultural markers of the 2010s vs. the 2000s?
2000s: "subprime aesthetic": Hummers, McMansions, Arrested Development, 9/11 nationalism?
2010s: Instagram, self-care, succulents, Obama complacence, Return of History (Trump)?
I'm in a great microgeneration of millennials who graduated college in 2008 and entered job market just as it crashed. It wiped out our 20s: I ended up hiding in grad school/alt-ac for 11 years. Now in our 30s, just as things were coming together, the economy evaporates yet again
jfc I am so bored. Exhausted but can't sleep. I miss friends, I miss my family, shit I miss strangers. I miss going to pubs, I miss going to literally any place, doing literally anything besides "working from home". Lockdown life! And there's no sign of it lifting. Sorry to whine
I’m here on a boat with a Francis Scott Key impersonator and a few dozen eighteenth-century literary historians as I sip a free martini and the sun sets over the Baltimore harbor. 10/10 would recommend.
#asecs2022
As an American abroad I, a true patriot, started out resististing British punctuation practices, but I’m now seduced by its superior, coding-compatible logic that things in quotes always go *inside* periods, etc, bc as a ‘phrasal unit’ they are subset of the ‘sentence unit’.
What's a sonnet to a machine by any other name? Which textual features best predict whether 14 lines of verse is a sonnet? Word frequencies, or poetic forms (rhyme, meter, line length)? Answer: Poetic forms. Notes and code: (collab work with
@jdporterlive
)
Not going to MLA after all, too tired and cash-strapped, but wondering why we don't livestream panels. Might take a lot of infrastructure, but it'd help both the environment and our wallets, and it might connect the conference- and twitter-worlds of academia in an interesting way
"Scholars used to work on only a handful of texts, but now, **lightning flashes** with computation, we have analyzed hundreds of thousands of novels, **thunder** with billions of words and trillions of data-points! ha, haha, bwahaha, BWAHAHAHAHA" -the Manic Moment of the DH talk
The more I read distant reading work rooted in text classification – a machine-learning method frequently successful at distinguishing two genres of text – the more I wonder which genres *can’t* be classified. It seems such a ‘negative’ result would actually be *more* surprising.
Hi I'm poor and a geek, does anyone know of someone who would be interested in affordable tutoring sessions in Python programming, data science, text mining, natural language processing, social network analysis, etc?
one year antiversary with nicotine. these last two weeks were hard -- in Italy and Germany where folks smoke like it's the 1950s -- but today i fly back to Cali where it's the 2050s and if you smoke people come up to you, concerned, and offer you an avocado and a free yoga lesson
You know you never see anyone charging all those tricorders and phasers. Imagine how many USB cords they'd need on board Enterprise or Voyager. I guess they didn't realize the future would turn out to just be charging devices until you die.
Ah yes, a heartwarming tale of how a white male tech CEO recovered his stolen e-scooter by using an array of long-range surveillance devices and enlisting a racist, murderous police force to barge into a storefront in historically black Brooklyn.
My scooter was stolen last week. Unknown to the thief, I hid two Airtags inside it. I was able to use the Apple Find My network and UWB direction finding to recover the scooter today. Here’s how it all went down:
The humanities crisis is the climate change of the academy: somehow we just can't seem to look it in the eye, take it seriously, and then work together to fix it.
Genocide Joe, everyone. All his opposition to Israel is merely discursive or symbolic. But that’s enough for liberals, for whom politics is also merely discursive or symbolic.
What else is there to say?
The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs & 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, not to mention a whopping 25 F35 fighter jets/engines.
Everything you hear about Biden's "frustration" with Netanyahu is a smokescreen, a distraction.
@brent858
@tab_delete
@TheAtlantic
Indeed. The ethical analysis in this piece is, like its author, sophomoric: It boils down to "pro-Palestine protesters are just doing it to fit in" and that an ongoing genocide is not "a simple matter of right and wrong." Please, spare us the platitudes & apolitical hand-wringing
Excited to share the great convo about distant reading I had with Michaela Mahlberg on her fantastic podcast, Life & Language. If you can get over my vocal-fried drawl, I think we get into some really interesting Qs about computing, gender, AI, culture, and more. Thanks Michaela!
What would it take to put together an accurate, decades-long Jobs Census for the humanities? We would need to aggregate job postings across sources: the Wiki, H-Net, Academicjobsonline, ...others? And we'd need to get archives from MLA, AHA, etc? Thoughts? Is it doable? Worth it?
Has anyone argued for a *Very* Long Eighteenth Century yet? Maybe 1603-1901, to start with the Jacobean and end with Victorian. It would emphasize C18's position as a hinge period between early and late modernity, and be a hat-tip to new distant histories digital and pedagogical.
I don't know how this post got resurrected but some people are dunking on it, which is fine and honestly kind of flattering – how many humanists can be dunked on from a single image! – but here's a newer version, for better dunks.
@davidhogg111
@NRA
Please organize a protest of the NRA convention, David. Thank you for your activism on the issue. Not many can speak to this horror as you can.
@Ted_Underwood
These "show me the new facts" critiques are silly to me b/c they unselfconsciously adopt the naïve empiricism they are trying to critique
This reminds me of the time I picked up a hitchhiker in Nevada who told me about the time he fought a 200 pound man and knocked him out cold; then, how he KO'd a 300 pound man, too; later, a 400 pound man. Finally, as I'm chuckling nervously he said "Yeah, so I'm high on meth rn"
Pedagogy proposal: why not collaborate more with programs in statistics, computer science, etc, to create hybrid majors where science gets half the classes as a method, and humanities gets the other half as a problem domain: a space of questions, challenges, histories, cultures?
Her and other mainstream Democrats' smug smirking disdain for anyone wanting a better choice than Genocider 1 vs Genocider 2... it's grotesque, sickening, maddening, infuriating.
When asked about US voters upset with the choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton says:
"Get over yourself. Those are the two choices."
Really glad to see she's learned lessons from her 2016 defeat then!
I’m so professionally confused. I was trained as a literary historian. And that digital methods helped us do lit hist. And that DH jobs would be in English where it was wanted. But today DH jobs are in data science or places where literature is at best cute, at worst a liability.
And beyond its material advantages, one benefit of having phd'd parents is (I imagine) growing up with people who understand what you do, read what you write, etc: a kind of cognitive continuity, not alienation.
...though Mom if you see this I love you! :)