The Washington Post has been publishing NSA slides that explain the PRISM data-collection program. These slides not only explain aspects of PRISM, but also allow us to see how the rhetoric of text analysis unfolds. How do people present PRISM to others? Note the “You Should Use Both” – the imperative in the voice.
The brilliant folk at Nebraska and at Northwestern have teamed up to use Abbott and EEBO-MorphAdorner on a collection of TCP-ECCO texts. The Abbot tools is available here, Vicar – Access to Abbot TEI-A Conversion! Abbot tries to convert texts with different forms of markup into a common form. MorphAdorner does part of speech tagging. Together they have made available 2,000 ECCO texts that can be studied together.
I’m still not sure I understand the collaboration completely, but I know from experience that analyzing XML documents can be difficult if each document uses XML differently. Abbot tries to convert XML texts into a common form that preserves as much of the local tagging as possible.
On July 11th and 12th I was at a conference in Saskatoon on Social Digital Scholarly Editing. This conference was organized by Peter Robinson and colleagues at the University of Saskatchewan. I kept conference notes here.
I gave a paper on “Social Texts and Social Tools.” My paper argued for text analysis tools as a “reader” of editions. I took the extreme case of big data text mining and what scraping/mining tools want in a text and don’t want in a text. I took this extreme view to challenge the scholarly editing view that the more interpretation you put into an edition the better. Big data wants to automate the process of gathering and mining texts – big data wants “clean” texts that don’t have markup, annotations, metadata and other interventions that can’t be easily removed. The variety of markup in digital humanities projects makes it very hard to clean them.
The response was appreciative of the provocation, but (thankfully) not convinced that big data was the audience of scholarly editors.
Slashdot has a story about Data Analytics’ Next Big Feat: Sarcasm Detection. The BBC article that this draws from says the French company Spotter has algorithms for 29 different languages and that they can “identify sentiment up to an 80% accuracy rate.”
A screen shot from Spotter shows a tool running on an iPad with a word cloud for exploration and selection tools.
The same Slashdot story sent me also to a Wall Street Journal story about how the Obama 2012 campaign used Salesforce for sentiment analysis on email coming into the campaign.
Inside Higher Ed has a good article on the gender imbalance in Philosophy titled, Georgia State tries new approach to attract more female students to philosophy. The article discusses an experiment at Georgia State University to increase the number of women philosophers on the syllabus to at least 20 percent and then see if that makes a difference in how women students see the field. The article also goes beyond just the Georgia experiment to discuss reasons and reactions. I can’t help feeling that there is a connection between the statistics (see previous post) about women leaving the humanities for business and a philosophy curriculum with so few women philosophers.
I realized the other day that I have been blogging for 10 years, as of June 11th, which seems like an anniversary. You can see my Welcome message here. The WordPress Dashboard tells me I have 1,921 posts which means I have posted approximately once every two or three days. I confess there are times when I think I should just wrap it up and stop the blog as it feels like one more thing I have to do. On the other hand Theoreti.ca has been useful to me as a place where I know I can find my own notes (as long as I can get to the net). I think I’ll keep on going a bit more.
Theoreti.ca is not the first blog I started. Back in 2001-2 when blogs were the new thing (for me) I actually tried starting one a couple of times. The problem was that they were aspirational – I started blogs hoping I would live up to the aspirations for witty commentary I set myself. Needless to say, after a few posts I stopped writing and the blogs thankfully disappeared. Theoreti.ca worked because I set out only to keep research notes. I set myself a low bar – write stuff that you might find useful later. The second post is an example of that – a list of possible “intersections of mathematics, computer science, philosophy and multimedia” that could make for a nice lecture series or conference. Not a lot of context, no wit, and not that useful to anyone but me.
The question I ask myself now is whether blogging of this sort is out of date. Others tweet such short notes and WordPress is used more for web sites that need a news or essay function.
Perhaps I’ll keep going on a bit more, just in case blogs come back like bell-bottom jeans.
There has recently been a fair amount of discussion in venues like the New York Time (Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm) about how the liberal arts (and humanities) are endangered.
This discussion was triggered by a report by the Commission on the Humanities & Social Sciences of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
As we strive to create a more civil public discourse, a more adaptable and creative workforce, and a more secure nation, the humanities and social sciences are the heart of the matter, the keeper of the republic—a source of national memory and civic vigor, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfillment and the ideals we hold in common. They are critical to a democratic society and they require our support.
This report was requested by Senators from both parties and will be distributed back to Congress. It engages some of the current perceptions that the humanities are useless while STEM should promoted. Nationwide (in the USA) only 7.6 % of bachelor’s degrees are in the humanities (compared to 36% in 1954.)
Needless to say there are different views as to why the decline. Some have blamed the left-wing concern with race, class, and gender. Others blamed public rhetoric or emphasis on STEM. The New York Times now has an interesting article that references work by Ben Schmidt that shows the change might be due to women shifting from the humanities to business. See Ben Schmidt’s recent blog entry. The issues seem much more complex. Perhaps we should celebrate the success of newer professional disciplines in engaging segments of students that might not have attended college before.
What also stands out is how quantitative historians as providing answers to these questions that are at odds with the more theory driven answers.
Last week I was interviewed by Judy Aldous on the CBC programme alberta@noon Monday June 10, 2013. We took calls about social media. I was intrigued by the range of reactions from “I don’t need anything other than messaging” to “I use it all the time for my company.” One point I was trying to make is that we all have to now manage our social media presence. There are too many venues to be present in all of them and, as my colleague Julie Rak points out, we are now all celebrities in the sense that we have to worry about how we appear in media. That means we need to educate ourselves to some degree and experiment with developing a voice.
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu has two new singles with neat videos on YouTube. Above you can see “Invader Invader” and the other is Ninja Re Bang Bang.
These two both have an anime/game theme. Could “Invader” refer to Space Invaders? Probably not. Here are the lyrics (translated into English) and it seems to be more about a fashion invasion from Japan.
The Economist has a short story about Zyngas woes: The chips are down. The story talks about how Znyga is struggling after being the darling of the casual games industry. Znyga hasn’t adapted to mobile gaming and spent too much money.
From Twitter I learned of Sam Biddle’s article on Fired Zynga Staff Hits Reddit to Talk Life Before the Massacre. This gathers some comments about life and business in Zynga from recently fired staff including a strategy of “fast follow” which means copying the good ideas of others.
At the same time I came across a story on a study Teens, Social Media, and Privacy by the Pew Research Center and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. They report that teens are turning away from Facebook as adults join. Teens are moving to using different tools for different tasks.
I can’t help wondering if there is a connection? If Facebook use by teens is dropping then Zynga’s Facebook games could run into trouble.