Author Archives: VCD

Guest Post: Cataloguing the Catalogue

Cosmin Dszurdsza is a research assistant at The Life of Words. In my last guest post I discussed problematic magazine classifications. Now, once again, a periodical publication proves to be an exciting and difficult genre identification challenge. The kind of text I will be dealing with today is the “catalogue” (filtered out of our data […]

Guest Post: Magazines and the Dentist Test

Cosmin Dzsurdzsa is a research assistant working on identifying the textual genre of quotations in the OED. Here he writes the first in a series of posts on borderline and difficult genre determinations. Filtering quotation blocks is essential to optimizing our results with the quantity of data we deal with here at LOW. For a […]

Guest Post: Strong and Weak Genre Classification

Over the summer we’re featuring guest posts by Research Assistants at The Life of Words. Here Cosmin Dzsurdzsa – a 2nd year undergraduate in English at UW – thinks about moving from human intuition to computer rule-making in textual-genre classification: When trying to automate text classification algorithmically, one has to pay close attention to how […]

Guest Post: A Winter-Evening Conference and the Problem of Genre

Cosmin Dzsurdzsa is well into his first full-time co-op term as a research assistant at The Life of Words. Here he tells us about a case that seemed to challenge every classification rule we developed. What is “genre”? This is a question I constantly find myself asking as an RA here at The Life of […]