Class Business
Coming soon: mid-course assessments of practicums.
- Readings for Next Classes
- For Tuesday
- Chris Nicholson, “A Beginner’s Guide to Neural Networks and Deep Learning” (n. d.)
- Demi Ajayi, “How BERT and GPT Models Change the Game for NLP”(2020)
- Minh Hua and Rita Raley, “Playing With Unicorns: AI Dungeon and Citizen NLP” (2020) [If you can’t finish this article by this class, try to read at least the first two sections; and then finish the rest of the article for the next class.]
- For Thursday
- Emily M. Bender et al., “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” (2021
- [Optional: If you are interested in the controversy and background behind this article, see Tim Simonite, “What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru” (2021)]
- Emily M. Bender et al., “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” (2021
Due Thursday, Nov. 10th: Large Language Models & Text-to-Image Large Models Exercise
- For Tuesday
Practicum 5: Word Embedding Exercise
Discussion of Word Embedding
Benjamin Schmidt, “Vector Space Models for the Digital Humanities” (2015)
The point, though, is that that “sweet/salty” and “vegetable/meaty” are both binary relations that share some interesting properties:
* They are not captured by a single word;
* They nonetheless exist, in some sense, in the real world;
* They exist as a spectrum rather than a class.I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most interesting problems in the humanities are this sort of thing. When we study the discourse of Catholicism, we tend to actually mean not some abstract linguistic field on its own but rather a set of vocabularies in tension with other ones. One person might study Catholic rhetoric compared to protestantism; another compared to atheist rhetoric; another compared to indigenous cultures. (Author, 1)
Now, I know no one who studies “meatiness” as a binary. But a tremendous number of humanities projects are constructed around things that can be conceived as binaries. Center/periphery,prestigious/popular, protestant/catholic, etc.; toying with with implications of some binary in language is at the heart of all sorts of humanistic work. I (Author, 1)
Ryan Heuser, “Word Vectors in the Eighteenth Century” (conference proceedings abstract) (2017) 
- James Lee, James, Blaine Greteman, Jason Lee, and David Eichmann, “Linked Reading: Digital Historicism and Early Modern Discourses of Race around Shakespeare’s Othello” (2018)
“Word2Vec Model of “Complexion” (EEBO Corpus from 1500 to 1623)” — Fig. 14 in James Lee, Blaine Greteman, Jason Lee, and David Eichmann. “Linked Reading: Digital Historicism and Early Modern Discourses of Race around Shakespeare’s Othello.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2018.
- Fabian Offert, “Intuition and Epistemology of High-Dimensional Vector Space” (2021)
- Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (1982)
- Catachresis “concerns first the violent, forced, abusive inscription of a sign, the imposition of a sign upon a meaning which did not yet have its own proper sign in language” (255)
- J. Hillis Miller, “The Figure in the Carpet” (1980):
- “Catachresis is the name for that procedure whereby [Henry] James uses all the realistic detail of his procedure as a novelist to name in figure, abusive transfer, something else for which there is no literal name and therefore, within the convention of referentiality which the story as a realistic novel accepts, no existence” (111)
