Hesburgh Libraries

Discussion Overview

Bring your lunch and join us for a discussion!

Read/Download is a discussion group that explores the perceived boundary between “traditional” reading and computational analysis.

Participants will examine humanistic research that makes use of digital evidence, and weigh the implications for art and scholarship.

In this session, we will be reading Ted Underwood's hot-off-the-preprint article, "Machine Learning and Human Perspective." This article re-examines the assumption that numbers are only useful for objective description and explores how machine learning can be used to examine subjective categorizations of literary genre across time, which in turn sheds light on received histories of genres.