Sdlong

LATEST ARTICLES ( 46 )

• Historical Linguistics and Population Genetics

  Reich et al. provide a model of two ancient populations in India that are ancestral to modern populations—Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South... Read more

  Posted on 10 March 2014 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• “Re-purposing Data” in the Digital Humanities

  Histories of science and technology provide many examples of accidental discovery. Researchers go looking for one thing and find another. Or, more often, they... Read more

  Posted on 20 February 2014 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Graphing Citations and Grasping Disciplinary Divisions

  

  A Pareto distribution: the troubling result of Derek Mueller’s distant reading of citations in College Composition and Communication: a “long tail” of citations... Read more

  Posted on 24 December 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Grammatical Anaphors Without C-command

  

  More on Chomsky’s Binding Theory. It’s a good example of how generative rules are constantly formulated and re-formulated in light of new evidence—languages... Read more

  Posted on 22 November 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Binding Reflexives and Herding Cats

  Chomsky’s insight is that language possesses structure independent of meaning. Take the examples below:(1a) There seems to be a girl in the garden(1b) ??There... Read more

  Posted on 14 November 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Uploading a Corpus to the NLTK, Part 2

  

  Last year I posted a brief tutorial explaining how to upload a custom corpus into the Natural Language Toolkit. The post receives frequent hits via search... Read more

  Posted on 22 October 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Race, Gender, and Dot Density Maps

  

  Two examples of dot density maps, which are primarily used to visualize demographic space.At UXBlog: The Dispersion of Life and Gender in New York City“Now it... Read more

  Posted on 22 October 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Grounding Empiricism with a Rhetorical Epistemology (Part 2)

  

  Once we allow for the reality of material phenomena—phenomena independent of human minds and discourses—the next two questions are, first, to what extent can... Read more

  Posted on 02 July 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Toward a Rhetorical Epistemology of Empiricism & Materiality (part I)

  I’ve mentioned this passage before: Haas (1995) speculates on how writers develop “memories” of their texts as they compose on word processors:Clearly, writers... Read more

  Posted on 02 July 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Humane/Anti-Humane

  Though he doesn’t state it directly, Timothy Burke recognizes that humanistic inquiry circa 2013 is at risk of being subsumed—enfolded into—techno-scientific... Read more

  Posted on 14 May 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Robo-Graders

  I was wrong about the mechanization of student writing. I had assumed another year or two would pass before MOOCs began utilizing essay grading software. Turns... Read more

  Posted on 10 April 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Building a Chinese Room

  Chomsky isn’t a fan of statistical machine learning. However, this video (via Steve Hsu) suggests that using Really Big Corpora is the best way to get machines... Read more

  Posted on 03 April 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Digital Maps and Social Data

  

  In the 80s and 90s, critical cartographers, such as J. B. Harley, reminded us that the map is not the territory. A map is always a representation, a... Read more

  Posted on 11 March 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• MOOCs and the Robot Economy

  From the Associated Press: The robot economy emergent. How long until the Rise of the Neo-Luddites? I’d be willing to wager $100 that within 5 years, we will se... Read more

  Posted on 08 March 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Technology and the Empirical Study of Writing

  

  A materialist theory of literary form will ultimately have to concern itself with the organic processes of reading and composition, but the way to do this is... Read more

  Posted on 27 February 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• How Not to Analyze Lots of Social Data

  

  The Atlantic reports on research from the Vermont Complex Systems Center. The research team attempted to rate states’ happiness levels by coding 10 million... Read more

  Posted on 20 February 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Robot Economy

  

  Exiting the Womb is Messy Hayek and Hazlitt assure us we needn’t worry about the loss of jobs to technological advances because said losses translate to newer... Read more

  Posted on 18 February 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Text Network of Christopher Dorner’s Manifesto

  

  I explored the Unabomber manifesto in my last post because another (much less interesting) manifesto has been in the news lately. Here’s a text network of... Read more

  Posted on 13 February 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• Text Network and Corpus Analysis of the Unabomber Manifesto

  

  Introduction The Unabomber Manifesto—Industrial Society and its Future—was sent to major newspapers in 1995, with an accompanying promise from its author, Ted... Read more

  Posted on 12 February 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE

• The Pareto Distribution of Native American Language Speakers

  

  My post about native American language health gets the most hits on this blog, so I decided to do some minor editorial housekeeping on it last night. Read more

  Posted on 25 January 2013 LANGUAGES, SCIENCE