Class 13 (English 197 – Winter 2025)

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Class Business

Readings for Next Classes

Word Embedding

Fleuron icon (small)

“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”

Fleuron icon (small)

Ryan Heuser, “Word Vectors in the Eighteenth Century” (conference proceedings abstract) (2017) PDF File

Ryan Heuser, "Word Vectors in the Eighteeth Century" (2017), Table 1
Table 1
Ryan Heuser, "Word Vectors in the Eighteeth Century" (2017), Table 2
Table 2

Word Embedding Demo (by S. Bandyopadhyay et al.)

Try finding analogies in the demo.

Case Study

Amendments to the U.S. Bill of Rights
Amendments to the U.S. Bill of Rights (National Archives transcription)

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?

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Problems with Word Embedding?

  • Bias
  • “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)

Fleuron icon (small)

This is the main course website. There is also a course Canvas site for uploading assignments.
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