Close Reading With Computers

BACLS: What Happens Now. 12th July 2018.

A book

Professor Martin Paul Eve, Birkbeck, University of London

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas Structure

Textual Scholarship and Visualization

Sankey visualization

Texts as Statistics, or: Close-Reading with Computers

Part of speech trigrams with more than 1.9 standard deviations of variance in any one section

Texts as Statistics, or: Close-Reading with Computers #2

Dating the words in Ewing Part I

Character-Based Recurrent Neural Networks

  • Trained on Textual Practice
  • Statistical modelling of character runs
  • Can be pre-trained with word2vec to create accurate semantic embedding
  • ‘The series of temporal inventions of the object is intelligible only afterwards’
  • ‘Slavoj Žižek, Live Fiction, trans. Rushdie and Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Bohestock Press, 1994)’

The End

Thank you!

Presentation licensed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Images excluded from CC license. Available to view online at https://meve.io/CRDH2018.