“Fail, n.” #NOTWOTY
The social media are in the midst of a brief kerfuffle over “selfie”, Oxford Dictionaries’ “Word of the Year”, hashtag #WOTY. And “hashtag”, of course, was last year’s #WOTY, as chosen by the competing...
View ArticleAdvance Access: Method as Tautology in the Digital Humanities
My article, “Method as tautology in the digital humanities” has gone up on Literary and Linguistic Computing‘s advance online publication area. If you have an institutional affiliation that lets you...
View Article“Graduate” or “be graduated”? Graduation on the active/passive divide
On the radio tonight I heard a person use passive “graduate” in a sentence: She was graduated a year early, because she was a top student I’m aware of this usage, and vaguely aware that it can be cited...
View ArticleHeadline: Pentagon Requires Poetry Expertise
I’ve come across an old piece on Guantánamo Bay censorship policy, via a new piece on the same. The recent piece is about poetry going into the US facility there; the earlier article is about poetry...
View ArticleProf. Balls-Upon a Floor discusses Metadata
With all the recent news talk about metadata, it’s worth remembering that so-called big data is useless without good algorithms to parse and analyse it, and rich metadata to guide us through it. In...
View ArticleNetflix, Algorithms, and Hard Working Humans
There has been some press today and yesterday surrounding Alexis Madrigal’s article in The Atlantic ["How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood"] on the genres Netflix uses to classify films – not just...
View Article#WOTYOTY. Because many, many #WOTY
Another week, another WOTY. Because marketing. The most recent and the final additional winner is because, chosen by the American Dialect Society a few days ago. Because “because marketing” … I mean,...
View ArticleJoseph Brodsky, Social Parasite
Joseph Brodsky died eighteen years ago today. Seamus Heaney, in his elegy for Brodsky, referred to it as “Yeats’s anniversary, | (Double-crossed and death-marched date | January twenty-eight)”. This...
View ArticleSappho, not a poetess – THE Poetess
The poetry world is all a twitter with the news that two new poems by Sappho have been discovered. And the Twitter world is spreading the news, chiefly linking to this write up in The Daily Beast: Many...
View ArticleAutomation ambition
A recent XKCD: As always, make sure to mouseover the comic for the extra punchline. This discovered as the computer nears the end of its second week of churning through self-comparisons of 2.3M...
View ArticleMeasured Words
Paul Batchelor’s 2012 review essay in the TLS of recent work by Geoffrey Hill and his critics was called “Geoffrey Hill’s measured words”. As many who write on Hill do, Batchelor keyed in to a series...
View ArticleHow different is poetic diction?
In “Measured Words” I made an assertion that “some words aren’t very common in speech but show up fairly frequently in poetry, and vice versa.” This is intuitive, but I’m going to demonstrate it...
View ArticleFrom “London” to “Potato”, Seamus Heaney in graphs
Yesterday I tested out a method of exploring poetic diction in poetic corpora, using Geoffrey Hill’s opus up to 2012 ["Measured Words"]. I left several issues hanging in that post, which I thought I...
View ArticleTwo Poetry Conferences in April
I’m currently getting material together for two conference papers in April. The first is for “Poetry and Happenstance” at Cambridge on April 4, which is a theme that fits nicely with the topics I’ve...
View ArticleLightening Poles
I’ve come across a pair of definitions for lightening (n.) which, while not antonymous (or antagonymous) nonetheless represent a kind of polarity. And not any old polarity–the polarity, probably. The...
View Article“Does steak love lettuce?” Most human-like computer poems (and vice versa).
I have happened upon Botpoet, a site that runs “Bot or Not”, a sort of Turing test using poems. It’s mildly entertaining to guess whether a poem was written by a human or a computer program, but I find...
View Article“Metaphors,” which to scholars cause pain and woe
I’ve recently been tracing out the history of a relation between two particular ideas in English culture, which I would call a metaphorical relation: one idea being described in terms of the other. In...
View ArticleIs Empson responsible for “ambiguity” uptick?
A quick addendum to yesterday’s post on the increase of metpahor and ambiguity in the Google books corpus. A faithful correspondent writes that at the time Paul Ricoeur’s The Rule of Metaphor (La...
View ArticlePoetry and Happenstance at Cambridge
Notes and thoughts from “Poetry and Happenstance”, a day-long symposium at Cambridge University, which took place last Friday, 4th April. There were eight papers in all: Anne Stillman – “What appears...
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