Category: Bookmark

Read - Want to Read: Don’t ask if artificial intelligence is good or fair, ask how it shifts power by Pratyusha Kalluri (Nature)
Law enforcement, marketers, hospitals and other bodies apply artificial intelligence (AI) to decide on matters such as who is profiled as a criminal, who is likely to buy what product at what price, who gets medical treatment and who gets hired.
Bookmarked Generalized Word Shift Graphs: A Method for Visualizing and Explaining Pairwise Comparisons Between Texts (arXiv.org)
A common task in computational text analyses is to quantify how two corpora differ according to a measurement like word frequency, sentiment, or information content. However, collapsing the texts' rich stories into a single number is often conceptually perilous, and it is difficult to confidently interpret interesting or unexpected textual patterns without looming concerns about data artifacts or measurement validity. To better capture fine-grained differences between texts, we introduce generalized word shift graphs, visualizations which yield a meaningful and interpretable summary of how individual words contribute to the variation between two texts for any measure that can be formulated as a weighted average. We show that this framework naturally encompasses many of the most commonly used approaches for comparing texts, including relative frequencies, dictionary scores, and entropy-based measures like the Kullback-Leibler and Jensen-Shannon divergences. Through several case studies, we demonstrate how generalized word shift graphs can be flexibly applied across domains for diagnostic investigation, hypothesis generation, and substantive interpretation. By providing a detailed lens into textual shifts between corpora, generalized word shift graphs help computational social scientists, digital humanists, and other text analysis practitioners fashion more robust scientific narratives.
Bookmarked Lecture Notes by Arun DebrayArun Debray (web.ma.utexas.edu)
I LATEXed up lecture notes for many of the classes I have taken; feel free to read through them or use them to review. If you find a mistake or typo, please let me know. If you want to look over the .tex source for any of these notes, please send me an email.
A great set of LaTeXed notes from a variety of coursework.

via Rama Kunapuli.

Bookmarked Introduction to and list of Child ballads by Peter Robins (peterrobins.co.uk)
The American academic Francis J Child devoted much of the latter part of his life to collecting and studying traditional ballads. His first publication on the subject was English and Scottish Ballads, 8 vols published in 1857-8. This was revised and augmented in a collection of 305 British ballads, published in 5 volumes in 1882-1898 as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, often known as the ‘Child Ballads’. These were republished in 2003 by Dover Press. In addition, copies of the 19th-century edition are now available on the Internet Archive: vols I, II, III, IV, V. Copies of the original 1857 vols are also available on Google Books: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII. See Wikipedia entries on Child and the ballads. The text on this site, based on files kindly provided by Cathy Lynn Preston of the University of Colorado, provides the text of those ballads for browsing and searching; it does not provide Child’s scholarly commentary.