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Language convergence and divergence
https://technaverbascripta.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/language-convergence-and-divergence
November 15, 2012. Language convergence and divergence. In Graphs, Maps, Trees. Franco Moretti writes the following:. Divergence prepares the ground for convergence, which unleashes further divergence: this seems to be the typical pattern. Moreover, the force of the two mechanisms varies widely from field to field, ranging from the pole of technology, where convergence is particularly strong, to the opposite extreme of language, where divergence is clearly the dominant factor. On how English itself is a ...
technaverbascripta.wordpress.com
May 2016
https://technaverbascripta.wordpress.com/2016/05
May 11, 2016. Responding to Allington et. al’s argument that the digital humanities are a handmaiden to neoliberalism and non-progressive scholarship, J uliana Spahr, Richard So, and Andrew Piper respond. That DH and progressive scholarship are not in fact incommensurable. Without getting too deep into the many contours of the debate, I want to suggest in this post what I think may be the hidden crux of the argument (though I doubt the authors of either essay would agree with me). Spahr et al.:. In these...
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An Attempt at Quantifying Changes to Genre Medium
https://technaverbascripta.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/831
January 19, 2016. An Attempt at Quantifying Changes to Genre Medium. Rule et al.’s (2015) article on the State of the Union. Adapting a Python script written by Dennis Muhlestein. Cosine similarity of oral/written SotU pairs. In the article (to take a quick stab at summarizing my argument) I suggest that this metric, among others, reflects a genre whose stability is challenged but not undermined by changes to medium as well as parallel changes initiated by the medial alteration. Mary hates dogs and cats.
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Readability formulas
https://technaverbascripta.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/possible-uses-for-readability-formulas
March 30, 2016. Readability scores were originally developed to assist primary and secondary educators in choosing texts appropriate for particular ages and grade levels. They were then picked up by industry and the military as tools to ensure that technical documentation written in-house was not overly difficult and could be understood by the general public or by soldiers without formal schooling. There are many readability metrics. The most popular readability formulas are the Flesch and Flesch-Kincaid.
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Halliday v. Chomsky
https://technaverbascripta.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/halliday-v-chomsky
September 26, 2012. Halliday v. Chomsky. Meaning and social function. Into their accounts of grammar. The linguist who inspired me the most was Michael Halliday. His systemic functional grammar was the first linguistic theory I tried to understand. The interesting thing is, however, that Halliday never comes out and positions systemic functional grammar. Now that I’m studying generative grammar, I am coming to realize that Halliday is quite right not to position his theory against Chomsky’s. It’s. Anothe...
technaverbascripta.wordpress.com
Relinquishing Control
https://technaverbascripta.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/relinquishing-control
May 11, 2016. Responding to Allington et. al’s argument that the digital humanities are a handmaiden to neoliberalism and non-progressive scholarship, J uliana Spahr, Richard So, and Andrew Piper respond. That DH and progressive scholarship are not in fact incommensurable. Without getting too deep into the many contours of the debate, I want to suggest in this post what I think may be the hidden crux of the argument (though I doubt the authors of either essay would agree with me). Spahr et al.:. In these...
technaverbascripta.wordpress.com
Cosine similarity parameters: tf-idf or Boolean?
https://technaverbascripta.wordpress.com/2016/03/28/cosine-similarity-parameters-tf-idf-or-boolean
March 28, 2016. 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 whether and to what extent different metrics entered into the vectors—either a Boolean entry or a tf-idf score—change the results. But what exactly goes into the vectors in these matrices? Not words from the two texts under comparison, obviously, but. Compliments to Dennis Muhlstein) which uses...
technaverbascripta.wordpress.com
Loading a corpus into the Natural Language Toolkit
https://technaverbascripta.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/loading-a-corpus-into-the-natural-language-toolkit
September 25, 2012. Loading a corpus into the Natural Language Toolkit. UPDATED: See this post. For a more thorough version of the one below.]. Looking through the forum at the Natural Language Toolkit website. I’ve noticed a lot of people asking how to load their own corpus into NLTK. For now, I’ll provide the basic steps for loading your own non-tagged corpus into the program:. As two separate lexical entries because one is capitalized and one isn’t.). Save the .txt file in the Python folder. Hello Set...
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An Attempt at Quantifying Changes to Genre Medium, cont’d.
https://technaverbascripta.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/an-attempt-at-quantifying-changes-to-genre-medium-contd
January 20, 2016. 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 overlooked by Rule et al. (2015). A change in medium. Affect genre features, if only at the margins. The most obvious change is to length, which I pointed out in the last post. But how to discover lexical differences? Natural Language Processing with Python. Given the SotU corpus’s...
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Grammatical Anaphors without C-command
https://technaverbascripta.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/grammatical-anaphors-without-c-command
November 22, 2013. 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 are infinite, there’s always new evidence—a seemingly endless process that to my mind undermines the entire concept of Universal Grammar (though not the fact of linguistic structure). To anaphor distribution, which is what Principle A is supposed to account for. Is a structural relation. ...
