Working notes & digital experiments
Over the last year or so, several curious circumstances sent me down the rabbit hole of algorithmic music composition. First an intriguing question on classifying genuine and fake piano rolls, then a brilliant professor writing an opera on the life of Alan Turing, and finally a gifted graduate student asking probing questions about OpenAI’s VQ-VAE model all made me increasingly interested in…
NB: This page loads several neural network models and large image atlases which may take time to load on a mobile device. An autoencoder is a type of neural network that is comprised of two functions: an encoder that projects data from high to low dimensionality, and a decoder that projects data from low to high dimensionality. To understand how these two functions work, let’s consider the…
Lloyd iteration is an iterative algorithm that distributes points within a space. During each iteration of the algorithm, Lloyd iteration builds a Voronoi map in which each point is contained within a distinct Voronoi cell, then centers each point within its cell. This operation causes overlapping points to spread out within a distribution, which can be helpful for data visualization purposes: The…
Many websites require authentication to protect private data. When working on a website that uses a server, it’s usually not too much trouble to create some server-side middleware that protects certain routes or web pages. When working on a serverless website served by Apache or Nginx, one can use htpasswd files to challenge users to authenticate. When working on a serverless website hosted from…
For the last year or so, Yale’s DHLab has undertaken a series of experiments organized around analysis of visual culture. Some of those experiments have involved identifying similar images and visualizing patterns uncovered in this process. In this post, I wanted to discuss how we used the amazing Three.js library to build a WebGL-powered visualization that can display tens of thousands of images…
This year’s theme in Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab is visual culture. We’ve spent a good deal of time talking about image mining, color analysis, and related themes, and have become interested in one particular task: identifying similar images in large photo collections. Our work on this subject began when Peter Leonard stumbled across a thread that revolves around using TensorFlow to obtain…
In 1906, William Sumner defined ethnocentrism as the “view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it”. Among the ethnocentric, Sumner continued, “each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exists in its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders” [13]. This notion of “in-group…
Frameworks like Jekyll, Middleman, and Gatsby make it fun and easy to build static file websites. Static file sites are fast, flexible, and can be hosted essentially for free using something like Github Pages or Amazon Web Services’ S3 service. The catch to static sites, however, is they lack any real server-side code, which makes it hard to allow users to Create, Read, Update, or Destroy (CRUD)…
D3.js does magic with svgs, and Primitive transforms images into svgs. Put them together and you can turn Kevin Bacon into Francis Bacon (click the page): To help others produce image transitions like this, I put together a quick proof of concept repository. The general approach is to transform each image from a raster object to an SVG object using Primitive. Here’s a simple Python function that…
Several months ago, I worked with Professor David Corso and his team at the University of Michigan on an MDP Project to subdivide newspaper articles from full newspaper sheets. Our project revolved around analyzing a newspaper sheet, identifying each of the articles within that sheet, and saving each article to a unique file. The purpose of the exercise was to allow downstream applications to run…
Shared filesystem servers like AFS sometimes try to manage the duration of user sessions through the concept of authentication tokens. If you SSH to a server running AFS, you create a token that grants you access to your portion of the filesystem. Once you logout, that token is destroyed, which cuts off access to the filesystem. If a user starts some background processes (e.g. behind a screen)…
Last week I wrapped up PlagiaryPoets.io, an interactive app that visualizes text reuse within early poetry: I was inspired to build the app after spending a month studying D3.js with Bob Holt, Mike Pennisi, and Yannick Assogba, three brilliant developers who work for Bocoup. The site was a lot of fun to build, and I look forward to launching related projects in the months to come. If you have any…
Some time ago, I was intrigued to discover that Shakespeare’s Histories have a noticeable lack of female characters [link]. Since then, I’ve been curious to further explore the nuances of Shakespearean characters, paying particular respect to the gender dynamics of the Bard’s plays. This post is a quick sketch of some of the insights to which that curiosity has led. To get a closer look at…
Google’s Word2Vec and Stanford’s GloVe have recently offered two fantastic open source software packages capable of transposing words into a high dimension vector space. In both cases, a vector’s position within the high dimensional space gives a good indication of the word’s semantic class (among other things), and in both cases these vector positions can be used in a variety of applications. In…
Oliver Goldsmith, one of the great poets, playwrights, and historians of science from the Enlightenment, was many things. He was ‘an idle, orchard-robbing schoolboy; a tuneful but intractable sizar of Trinity; a lounging, loitering, fair-haunting, flute-playing Irish ‘buckeen.’’ He was also a brilliant plagiarist. Goldsmith frequently borrowed whole sentences and paragraphs from French philosophes…
In her fantastic series of lectures on early modern England, Emma Smith identifies an interesting feature that differentiates the tragedies and comedies of Elizabethan drama: ‘Tragedies tend to have more streamlined plots, or less plot—you know, fewer things happening. Comedies tend to enjoy a multiplication of characters, disguises, and trickeries. I mean, you could partly think about the way…
Suppose you have a collection of text files and would like to compare each of those files to each of the others. Perhaps you would like to know which characters, locations, or stage directions in each file occur in any of the others. Whatever the task, if your collection is small enough—on the order of a few paragraphs, say—you can of course compare the files manually, reading each of your…
Over the last few months, I’ve been working with colleagues at Notre Dame to develop computational approaches we can use to identify the genres to which a literary work belongs. Initially, we focused our research on the georgic, a class of agricultural-cum-labour poems that flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Eventually, though, our limited research corpus led us to investigate…
When Samuel Richardson’s Mrs. Jewkes remarks that ‘Nought can restrain consent of twain,’ we confidently conclude she’s quoting Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso. When Edmund Burke writes in his Philosophical Enquiry, ‘Dark with excessive light thy skirts appear,’ we know he’s misquoting Milton. While passages like these make their debts fairly clear, though, in most cases literary…
Working with Professor Matthew Wilkens, my fellow doctoral student Suen Wong, and undergraduates at Notre Dame, I have spent the last few months using the Stanford Named Entity Recognition (NER) classifier to identify locations in a few thousand works of nineteenth-century American literature. Using the NER classifier—an enormously powerful tool that can identify such “named entities” in texts as…
When it comes to literary research, Literature Online is no doubt one of the best digital resources around. The site hosts a third of a million full-length texts, the definitive collection of digitized criticism, and a robust interface that boasts such advanced features as lemmatized and fuzzy spelling search options. When I started looking for a public API that would allow users to mobilize the…
I have recently begun submitting scripts to my home institution’s computer cluster. Although submitting jobs to the cluster is a fairly straightforward task, it took me a bit of time to figure out how to format jobs such that the Sun Grid Engine queuing system employed here at Notre Dame could process my scripts and distribute them over the cluster. In case others would like to be able to…