"Everything . . . in nature's vast workshop from the extinction of some remote sun to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which beautify our public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet unascertained.” (Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)
Before I ever became a computational humanist, I was a James Joyce scholar. What drew me to Joyce was not difficulty for its own sake, but his extraordinary intimacy with language and his willingness to follow the word wherever it led, even when that path violated every convention of narrative efficiency or reader ease. A [ ] The post The Seductive Allure of Generative AI for Storytelling first…
I recently reread David Epstein’s Range (2019), a book I first encountered a few years ago when it seemed every leadership forum was extolling the virtues of grit, 10,000 hours, and early specialization. Epstein pushed back, persuasively arguing that generalists, not specialists, are better equipped to solve complex problems, especially in domains where rules are unclear and [ ] The post…
Back when I was working on Macroanalysis, Gephi was a young and sometimes buggy application. So when it came to the network analysis in Chapter 9, I was limited in terms of the amount of data that could be visualized. For the network graphs, I reduced the number of edges from 5,660,695 down to 167,770 [ ] The post Revisiting Chapter Nine of Macroanalysis first appeared on Matthew L. Jockers .
On Friday I posted an updated version of Syuzhet (1.0.4) to CRAN. This version has been available over on GitHub for a while now. In version 1.0.4, support for sentiment detection in several languages was added by using the expanded NRC lexicon from Saif Mohammed. The lexicon includes sentiment values for 13,901 words in each [ ] The post Syuzhet 1.0.4 now on CRAN first appeared on Matthew L.…
On April 6th, 2015, I posted Requiem for a low pass filter acknowledging that the smoothing filter as I had implemented it in the beta version of Syuzhet was not performing satisfactorily. Ben Schmidt had demonstrated that the filter was artificially distorting the edges of the plots, and prior to Ben s post, Annie Swafford had [ ] The post Resurrecting a Low Pass Filter (well, kind of) first…
Back in December I posted results from a human validation experiment in which machine extracted sentiment values were compared to human coded values. The results were encouraging. In the spring, we mined the human coded sentences to help create a new sentiment dictionary that would, in theory, be more sensitive to the sort of sentiment [ ] The post More Syuzhet Validation first appeared on Matthew…
Eight months ago I began a series of blog posts about my experiments using sentiment analysis as a proxy for plot movement. At the time, I had done a fair bit of anecdotal analysis of how well the sentiments detected by a machine matched my own sense of the sentiments in a series of familiar novels. In [ ] The post That Sentimental Feeling first appeared on Matthew L. Jockers .
This morning Andrew N. Jackson posted an interesting alternative to the smoothing of sentiment trajectories. Instead of smoothing the trajectories with a moving average, lowess, or, dare I say it, low-pass filter, Andrew suggests cumulative summing as a simple but potentially powerful way of re-plotting the sentiment data. I spent a little time exploring and thinking about his approach this [ ]…
Ben Schmidt s and Scott Enderle s recent entries into the syuzhet discussion have beaten the last of the low pass filter out of me. I m not entirely ready to concede that Fourier is useless for the larger problem, but they have convinced me that a better solution than the low pass is possible and probably warranted. What that better solution is remains an [ ] The post Requiem for a low pass filter…
While developing the Syuzhet package a tool for tracking relative shifts in narrative sentiment I spent a fair amount of time gut-checking whether the sentiment values returned by the machine methods were a good match for my own sense of the narrative sentiment. Between 70% and 80% of the time, they were what I considered to be good sentence level matches. . [ ] The post My Sentiments (Exactly?)…