Class Business
Readings for Next Classes
- For Tuesday (Feb. 25th)
- For next Thursday (Feb 27th)
- Note: class on Thursday will be over Zoom due to a scheduled internet outage in South Hall)
Due Thursday: Large Language Models & Text-to-Image Large Models Exercise
Word Embedding
- Luis Serrano, “What Are Word and Sentence Embeddings?” (2023)
- Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay et al., “Word Embedding Demo: Tutorial” (2022) — Note: The actual interactive demo accompanying this tutorial about word embeddings (or word vectors) is assigned for the second part of Practicum 5.
- Nika Mavrody, Laura B. McGrath, Nichole Nomura, and Alexander Sherman, “Voice” (2021) — Read the “Abstract” and pp. 155-164.
- Ryan Heuser, “Word Vectors in the Eighteenth Century” (conference proceedings abstract) (2017)
![]()
“Infinite Craft” by Neal Agarwal
Tensorflow Embedding Projector (Google AI)
Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay et al., “Word Embedding Demo: Tutorial” (2022) — Interactive demo
Semantris game from Google AI
Practicum 5: Word Embedding Exercise
Using Word Embedding
Applied Use Examples from Assigned Readings
Nika Mavrody, Laura B. McGrath, Nichole Nomura, and Alexander Sherman, “Voice” (2021) — “Abstract” and pp. 155-164.
Ultimately, we show that voice, style, and genre operate in a unified vernacular critical system, that voice (along with genre) is a subcategory of style, and that voice consists of the parts of style not otherwise captured by genre.
“Voice”
“Style”
“Style – Voice = Genre”
“Style – Genre = Voice”
Ryan Heuser, “Word Vectors in the Eighteenth Century” (conference proceedings abstract) (2017) 


Word Embedding Demo (by S. Bandyopadhyay et al.)
Try finding analogies in the demo.
- 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.
Case Study

Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Your Uses for Word Embedding?
?
Problems with Word Embedding?
- Bias
- Parul Pandey, “Visualizing Bias in Data Using Embedding Projector” (2019)
- “Catachresis”
- 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)
