brendan_oconnor_ai brendan_oconnor_ai-2013 brendan_oconnor_ai-2013-200 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Update (2013-09-17): See David Bamman ‘s great guest post on Language Log on our latent personas paper, and the big picture of interdisciplinary collaboration. I’ve been informed that an interesting critique of my, David Bamman’s and Noah Smith’s ACL paper on movie personas has appeared on the Language Log, a guest post by Hannah Alpert-Abrams and Dan Garrette . I posted the following as a comment on LL. Thanks everyone for the interesting comments. Scholarship is an ongoing conversation, and we hope our work might contribute to it. Responding to the concerns about our paper , We did not try to make a contribution to contemporary literary theory. Rather, we focus on developing a computational linguistic research method of analyzing characters in stories. We hope there is a place for both the development of new research methods, as well as actual new substantive findings. If you think about the tremendous possibilities for computer science and humanities collabor
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Update (2013-09-17): See David Bamman ‘s great guest post on Language Log on our latent personas paper, and the big picture of interdisciplinary collaboration. [sent-1, score-0.389]
2 I’ve been informed that an interesting critique of my, David Bamman’s and Noah Smith’s ACL paper on movie personas has appeared on the Language Log, a guest post by Hannah Alpert-Abrams and Dan Garrette . [sent-2, score-0.431]
3 Scholarship is an ongoing conversation, and we hope our work might contribute to it. [sent-5, score-0.331]
4 Responding to the concerns about our paper , We did not try to make a contribution to contemporary literary theory. [sent-6, score-0.164]
5 Rather, we focus on developing a computational linguistic research method of analyzing characters in stories. [sent-7, score-0.638]
6 We hope there is a place for both the development of new research methods, as well as actual new substantive findings. [sent-8, score-0.359]
7 If you think about the tremendous possibilities for computer science and humanities collaboration, there is far too much to do and we have to tackle pieces of the puzzle to move forward. [sent-9, score-0.334]
8 All the comments above show there are a wealth of interesting questions to further investigate. [sent-11, score-0.163]
9 We find that, in these multidisciplinary projects, it’s most useful to publish part of the work early and get scholarly feedback, instead of waiting for years before trying to write a “perfect” paper. [sent-13, score-0.656]
10 (And David’s co-teaching a cool digital humanities seminar with Christopher Warren in the English department this semester — I’m sure there will be great cross-fertilization of ideas coming out of there! [sent-15, score-0.395]
11 ) For example, we’ve had useful feedback here already — besides comments from the computational linguistics community through the ACL paper, just in the discussion on LL there have been many interesting theories and references presented. [sent-16, score-0.76]
12 We’ve also been in conversation with other humanists — as we stated in our acknowledgments (noted by one commenter) — though apparently not the same humanists that Alpert-Abrams and Garrett would rather we had talked to. [sent-17, score-0.369]
13 This is why it’s better to publish early and participate in the scholarly conversation. [sent-18, score-0.351]
14 For what it’s worth, some of these high-level debates on whether it’s appropriate to focus on progress in quantitative methods, versus directly on substantive findings, have been playing out for decades in the social sciences. [sent-19, score-0.432]
15 (I’m thinking specifically about economics and political science, both of which are far more quantitative today than they were just 50 years ago. [sent-20, score-0.356]
16 ) And as several commenters have noted, and as we tried to in our references, there’s certainly been plenty of computational work in literary/cultural analysis before. [sent-21, score-0.344]
17 But I do think the quantitative approach still tends to be seen as novel in the humanities, and as the original response notes, there have been some problematic proclamations in this area recently. [sent-22, score-0.336]
18 I just hope there’s room to try to advance things without being everyone’s punching bag for whether or not they liked the latest Steven Pinker essay. [sent-23, score-0.29]
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