Hathi’s Automatic Genre Classifier

The HathiTrust Digital Library is a massive collection of digital books: As of 2017, it contains 5 billion pages from 15 million volumes (7 million titles). About 40% of these are public-domain works, meaning anyone can search and read them. Some of these have been marked for their textual genre. Here I do a little […]

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06.01.2017 – 13:40 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

OED Gender Genre

In “Sex in the OED” I  ran through some figures on female vs male representation in OED quotation evidence, comparing the original OED1 with the later Supplements that resulted in OED2. Here I look a little closer at what kinds of works by women the two editions tended to cite. Below are two charts breaking […]

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08.12.2016 – 10:05 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Burchfield’s Reach-Backs

The vast majority of the quotation evidence in Robert Burchfield’s OED Supplements comes from after the first (1928) edition was completed. The median date for these is 1944, whereas for the first edition it’s 1742. However, in some circumstances the Supplements did reach back into periods already covered by OED1 — if it could antedate […]

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06.12.2016 – 10:59 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Sex in the OED

Two subprojects concerning OED quotation metadata are now near enough to complete to present some preliminary results. They concern the sex of the authors quoted in the OED, in both the first edition (1928) and the later Supplements (1933, 1972-86). The most focused work on this question so far has been Baigent, Brewer, and Larminie, […]

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02.12.2016 – 17:21 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Entitled Professor

I happen to have an interest and a certain amount of expertise in words that mean their own opposites. You might say I’m qualified to post here on that topic. You might even say I’m entitled to my opinion on a wider range of things in which I’m not necessarily expert. But if you call […]

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23.11.2016 – 12:31 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Comments (0)

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 […]

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07.07.2016 – 09:17 | By VCD | Posted in Digital Humanities, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

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 […]

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06.06.2016 – 11:47 | By VCD | Posted in Lexicography | Comments (0)

Morsels, a kind of poem

Latest in the “A kind of poem” series [previous: here, here, and here], I give you is “Morsels”, a kind of poem: .

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02.06.2016 – 15:07 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry | Tagged | Comments (0)

Guest Post: Moving from 2.0 to 3.0

Danielle Griffin recently completed her co-op term as a full-time research assistant at The Life of Words. Here she offers some thoughts about her work on identifying the textual genre of quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary: When I started my job as an RA, Dr. Williams had me tagging quotations five days a week […]

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02.06.2016 – 09:35 | By DBG | Posted in Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Competition Anthology Published

We’ve published our 2016 Life of Words Anthology, presenting fifteen meritorious poems sent to us in our “Write a Poem about a Word” competition. It’s available here: Congratulations to all!

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02.06.2016 – 08:45 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry | Comments (0)