Tag Archives: text mining

Google pulls Chrome extension used to target Jewish people | engadget #racism #textmining #tech #history @Google #humanrights #plugins

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We must fight racism and stand up for human rights. Raising awareness is one of the ways. Treat kindly your family, friends, neighbours and every living thing.

Following a detailed investigation by Mic, Google has pulled a Chrome extension that was used by racists to identify and track Jewish people online. The plugin, called “Coincidence Detector,” added a series of triple parentheses around the surnames of Jewish writers and celebrities. For instance, visiting the page of Mic writer Cooper Fleishman, you’d see his surname presented as (((Fleishman))) — turning the symbol into the digital equivalent of the gold star badge used to identify Jews in Nazi Germany. Until Google banned it for violating its policy on hate speech, the plugin had just under 2,500 users and had a list of 8,768 names that were considered worthy of tracking. READ MORE: Google pulls Chrome extension used to target Jewish people | engadget

Here’s What A Robot Learned After Binge-Reading Romance Novels | HuffPost #AI #textmining #books #tech #machinelearning

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Earlier this month Google’s software engineer Andrew Dai explained to BuzzFeed News that the genre’s formulaic approach to storytelling makes it ideal for machine learning. They hit a sweet spot between the labyrinthine, meandering sentences found in literary fiction, and the less elevated language used in kids’ books.

And in a heartrending plot twist: the experiment worked. The hairy details were released last week, but in short, the AI successfully connected lines of text to related phrases based on frequently connected words and phrases used in romance novels. READ MORE: Here’s What A Robot Learned After Binge-Reading Romance Novels | HuffPost

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Google Is Feeding Romance Novels To Its AI Engine To Make Its Products More Conversational | BuzzFeed #AI #books

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This has to be one of the most awesome headlines I have ever seen while curating news for this blog! 🙂

For the past few months, Google has been feeding text like this to an AI engine — all of it taken from steamy romance novels with titles like Unconditional Love, Ignited, Fatal Desire, and Jacked Up. Google’s AI has read them all — every randy, bodice-ripping page — because the researchers overseeing its development have determined that parsing the text of romance novels could be a great way of enhancing the company’s technology with some of the personality and conversational skills it lacks.

And it’s working, too. Google’s research team recently got the AI to write sentences that resemble those in the books. With that achievement unlocked, they’re now planning to move on to bigger challenges: using the conversational styles the AI has learned to inform and humanize the company’s products, such as the typically staid Google app. READ MORE: Google Is Feeding Romance Novels To Its Artificial Intelligence Engine To Make Its Products More Conversational | BuzzFeed News

11 #Shakespeare Tragedies Mapped Out with Network Visualizations | Open Culture #dataviz #data #visualizations #analysis #plays #books

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Every story has its architecture, its joints and crossbeams, ornaments and deep structure. The boundaries and scope of a story, its built environment, can determine the kind of story it is, tragedy, comedy, or otherwise. And every story also, it appears, generates a network—a web of weak and strong connections, hubs, and nodes. Take Shakespeare’s tragedies. We would expect their networks of characters to be dense, what with all those plays’ intrigues and feasts. And they are, according to digital humanities, data visualization, and network analysis scholar Martin Grandjean, who created the charts you see here:  READ MORE: 11 Shakespeare Tragedies Mapped Out with Network Visualizations | Open Culture

#Sex Talk in #Literature: How It’s Changed Over 200 Years | Flavorwire #books #research

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Sex Talk in Literature: How It’s Changed Over 200 Years | Flavorwire

A British health website, DrEd.com, delved into the entire corpus of literature, both fiction and nonfiction, to explore the way certain words having to do with “venereal” matters have appeared, faded, or been associated with new companion words over the last two centuries. READ MORE: Sex Talk in Literature: How It’s Changed Over 200 Years | Flavorwire.

Biodiversity Heritage Library Launches #Crowdsourcing #Games | Library Journal #libraries #search #gamification #volunteer

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The Purposeful Gaming and BHL project recently launched its first two browser-based video games, Smorball and Beanstalk.  Both are designed to offer players a fun online diversion while helping the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) enable full-text searching of digitized materials. Funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which was awarded in December 2013, the project is exploring how games might be used to entice people to participate in crowdsourcing efforts at libraries and museums. READ MORE: Biodiversity Heritage Library Launches Crowdsourcing Games | Library Journal

What is Text Mining? | Information Space

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Text-mining programs go further, categorizing information, making links between otherwise unconnected documents and providing visual maps via What is Text Mining? | Information Space.

Text mining, or the indexing of content, is important because it allows us to make sense and extract meaning out of large amounts of data. Text-mining is an activity also related to data curation, the semantic web, big data and bioinformatics. Its becoming more popular as a way to conduct research and information retrieval within databases.

Here is an informative presentation called The Library as Dataset: Text Mining at Million-Book Scale from Yale University, which discusses a text mining method, digital humanities and libraries.

Here is an article with an information science perspective called Text Mining and Information Retrieval, Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 2011, 35(3), pp. 223-227, if you have access to scholarly databases.