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ACS research team discusses their midpoint findings for the Semantic Phasor Embeddings project. |
ACS awardees: Molly Des Jardin, Scott Enderle, Katie Rawson (University of Pennsylvania)
Much recent discussion of quantitative research in the humanities has concerned scale. Confronted with the vast quantities of data produced by digitization projects over the last decade, humanists have begun exploring ways to synthesize that data to tell stories that could not have been told before. Our ACS project aims to make that kind of work easier by creating compact, non-expressive, non-consumptive representations of individual volumes as vectors. These vectors will contain information not only about the topics the volumes cover, but also about the way they order that coverage from beginning to end. Our hope is that these representations will allow distant readers to investigate the internal structures of texts at larger scales than have been possible before. But now that we've reached the midpoint of our work, our preliminary results have led to some surprising reflections about scale at much smaller levels.
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