Category Archives: Digital Humanities

Vector Space and Poetic Logic

I’ve been spending the weekend experimenting with vector space modelling and poetic language. Vector space word embedding models use learning algorithms on very large corpora in order map a unique location in n-dimensional space to each token (=word) in the corpus. “N-dimensional space” is just a mathy-sounding way of saying that multiple (or n) features […]

14.03.2016 – 10:40 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)

Ted Cruz is no Scyld Scefing

I’ve read Beowulf. Beowulf was a friend of mine. And Senator… You know, when things sound stupid, they very usually are. And this headline sounds stupid: Ted Cruz as Beowulf: Matching Candidates With the Books They Sound Like [- The Upshot (New York Times Data Blog – click to view article)] No one who has […]

29.10.2015 – 11:44 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Two Notes on T. S. Eliot and the OED

I have two upcoming notes in the journal Notes & Queries concerning T. S. Eliot and the Oxford English Dictionary. Though they won’t be published until later next year, the self-archiving policy at Oxford Journals allows me to make an unrevised pre-print version available here. The two articles are: “The ‘Oxford Dictionary’ in T. S. […]

28.09.2015 – 20:18 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Introducing the LOW Team

The recent Ontario Early Researcher Award [See “Big Boost for The Life of Words“] turned what had been largely a one-man show into a multi-person operation involving a number of research assistants and associates. To give them their due, I’ve created a team profiles page where they introduce themselves and their interests. I’ll keep this […]

07.08.2015 – 12:51 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Big boost for The Life of Words

This news just released: The Life of Words is getting a major boost, in the form of a $150,00 grant from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, UWaterloo, and St Jerome’s University, to fund my research on poetry and the Oxford English Dictionary. The Early Researcher Award provides $100,000 in funding from the Ministry […]

09.06.2015 – 16:01 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Method as Tautology

Although it has been available for a while in the advanced access section of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and before that Literary and Linguistic Computing, my article on digital methods in literary research has recently been published in its final version. The full bibliographic details are: Williams, David-Antoine. “Method as Tautology in the Digital […]

21.05.2015 – 11:42 | By D-AW | Posted in Criticism, Digital Humanities, Etymology, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Compounding Joyce

LOW on demand! This afternoon the Twitter threw up this query, following on from my last post on cutthroat compounds [Catchall for Cutthroats]: Well, here at The Life of Words, we aim to please. Since I’ve been mucking around with Python scripts to get at OED’s combinational formations (those bits typically at the end of […]

18.05.2015 – 18:44 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

Catchall for cutthroats

What is the difference between a catch-all and a catch-phrase? Both are compounds formed as Verb+Noun, but in catch-all, the noun is the direct object of the verb, whereas in catch-phrase it is the subject. That is, a catch-all is something that catches all things, whereas a catch-phrase is not something that catches phrases – […]

15.05.2015 – 17:33 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Etymology, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (7)

Little Miss Bossy Pants

In the comments to a Facebook share of my previous post on gendered language on Ratemyprofessors.com [“Vivid Unconscious Biases“], JB, a friend of a friend, writes: “bossy” is an inherently gendered term and is always used as an insult. I can’t remember ever hearing it applied to a man. Indeed, it strikes me that calling […]

11.02.2015 – 17:05 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Vivid unconscious biases

Claire Caine Miller has a post on the New York Times’s “Upshot” blog on Ben Schmidt‘s visualization tool for word frequencies in 14M ratemyprofessors.com reviews, called “Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender” [9.2.15]. While in general I find Schmidt’s stuff informative, fun, and provocative [for instance, his “Lets You” finding, which […]

08.02.2015 – 22:04 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)