Sdlong

LATEST ARTICLES ( 46 )

• A Distant Reading of My Autosomes

  

  It’s amazing what spit in a vial can tell you.When I mailed off the AncestryDNA kit, I figured I already knew the results, barring any family-shattering... Read more

  Posted on 03 April 2017 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Relinquishing Control

  Responding to Allington et. al’s argument that the digital humanities are a handmaiden to neoliberalism and non-progressive scholarship, Juliana Spahr, Richard... Read more

  Posted on 11 May 2016 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Possible Uses for Readability Formulas

  

  Readability scores were originally developed to assist primary and secondary educators in choosing texts appropriate for particular ages and grade levels. Read more

  Posted on 30 March 2016 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Cosine Similarity Parameters: Tf-idf Or Boolean?

  

  In a previous post, I used cosine similarity (a “vector space model”) to compare spoken vs. written States of the Union. In this post, I want to see just how... Read more

  Posted on 28 March 2016 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• An Attempt at Quantifying Changes to Genre Medium, Cont’d.

  

  Cosine similarity of all written/oral States of the Union is 0.55. A highly ambiguous result, but one that suggests there are likely some differences... Read more

  Posted on 20 January 2016 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• An Attempt at Quantifying Changes to Genre Medium

  

  Rule et al.’s (2015) article on the State of the Union makes the rather bold claim (for literary and rhetorical scholars) that changes to the SotU’s medium of... Read more

  Posted on 19 January 2016 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Structuralist Methods in a Post-Structuralist Humanities

  The topic of this conference (going on now!) at Utrecht University raises an issue similar to the one I raised in my article at LSE’s Impact Blog: that DH’ists... Read more

  Posted on 14 September 2015 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Some Questions About Centrality Measurements in Text Networks

  This .gif alternates between a text network calculated for betweenness centrality (smaller nodes overall) and one calculated for degree centrality (larger... Read more

  Posted on 12 September 2015 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Fives

  This is in response to Collin Brooke, who asked for some lists of 5.5 Books On My Desk The Bourgeois, Franco Moretti. In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan, John... Read more

  Posted on 21 August 2015 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Graphing Early Modern Memory Treatises

  

  Rhetoric’s fourth canon—memory—is synonymous with the art of memory. Today, the constructions of the ars memorativa are known as “memory palaces,” and they... Read more

  Posted on 13 April 2015 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Some Quick Text Mining of the 2015 CCCC Program

  

  During CCCC last week, Freddie deBoer made a couple comments about the conference: first, that there weren’t as many panels on the actual work of teaching... Read more

  Posted on 25 March 2015 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• University Representation at CCCC

  

  Here’s a list of the universities and colleges best represented at the 2015 CCCC conference. I used NLTK to locate named entities in the CCCC program, so the... Read more

  Posted on 25 March 2015 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• All Your Data Are Belong To Us

  In the blink of an eye, sci-fi dystopia becomes reality becomes the reality we take for granted becomes the legally enshrined status quo:“One of our top... Read more

  Posted on 20 February 2015 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Hindi 101

  

  I’m taking Hindi 101 this semester. The Devangari script feels mildly ornate in my hand compared to the angularity of alphabets descended from the Phoenician... Read more

  Posted on 02 October 2014 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Distorting Time in Order to Deny Inevitability

  The latest issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly has its authors engaging with “untimely historiography,” which, as near as I can tell, is an attempt to complicat... Read more

  Posted on 03 July 2014 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Elliot Rodger’s Manifesto: Text Networks and Corpus Features

  

  Analyzing manifestos is becoming a theme at this blog. Click here for Chris Dorner’s manifesto and here for the Unabomber manifesto. Read more

  Posted on 04 June 2014 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Demographic Distribution: Gender of Citations in CCC, RSQ, and RR Abstracts

  

  This post follows up on my discussion of citation frequencies in abstracts in rhetoric and composition journals. To reiterate, a safe assumption to make is... Read more

  Posted on 29 May 2014 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• A Possible Explanation for the Emergence of Quotative “like” in American English

  

  So Monica was like, “What are you doing here, Chandler?” and Chandler was like, “Uhh nothing” and then Monica was like, “Why are you here with Phoebe?” and... Read more

  Posted on 28 April 2014 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Lying with Data Visualizations: Is It Misleading to Truncate the Y-Axis?

  

  Making the rounds on Twitter today is a post by Ravi Parikh entitled “How to lie with data visualization.” It falls neatly into the “how to lie with... Read more

  Posted on 16 April 2014 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Distant Reading and the “Evolution” Metaphor

  

  1Are there any corpora that purposefully avoid “diachronicity”? There are corpora that possess no meta-data about publication dates and whose texts are therefor... Read more

  Posted on 26 March 2014 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE