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Editors’ Choice: How predictable is fiction?

.entry-header This blog post is loosely connected to a talk I’m giving (virtually) at the Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events at the ACL. It’s an informal talk, exploring some of the challenges and opportunities we encounter when we take the impressive sentence-level tools of contemporary NLP and try to use them to produce […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Do topic models warp time?

Recently, historians have been trying to understand cultural change by measuring the “distances” that separate texts, songs, or other cultural artifacts. Where distances are large, they infer that change has been rapid. There are many ways to define distance, but one common strategy begins by topic modeling the evidence. Each novel (or song, or political […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Can We Date Revolutions in the History of Literature and Music?

Humanists know the subjects we study are complex. So on the rare occasions when we describe them with numbers at all, we tend to proceed cautiously. Maybe too cautiously. Distant readers have spent a lot of time, for instance, just convincing colleagues that it might be okay to use numbers for exploratory purposes. But the […]