Last month, I wrote about a semantic subspace in the word2vec model of the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy. The idea, in short, is that you can train an extremely simple word-embedding mode (word2vec) on a body of text and then search the embedding space of that model (that is, the vector space made of all… Continue reading Probing the Bureaucrat-Poet Axis →

A while back I wrote a post about the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) that I described as 'digital doxography'. While the alliteration was satisfying, the post was not, for the simple reason that it didn't include any actual doxography. I've decided to make amends for this by using some statistical tools to see if… Continue reading Digital Doxography Redux →

A few days ago I posted a list of the most cited philosophers in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) to Bluesky. By coincidence, Eric Schwitzgebel was at that time compiling his own analysis of the most cited contemporary philosophers in the SEP. His analysis was brilliant, detailed, and rigorous. Mine was none of these… Continue reading The algorithmic evaluation of vibes →

When I made my map of the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy in February (okay, when the Gensim implementation of Word2Vec made the map and I coloured it in), I included a bit of discussion about how more neglected philosophers were clustered in one corner, in a ‘Desert of the Underexamined’, because their work was insufficiently… Continue reading Luxemburg by the Sea →

Word2Vec Word2Vec is a technique that uses a neural network to produce a representation of words as vectors in a multidimensional vector space. The network is trained to guess a word in a corpus based upon the context in which it appears (continuous bag-of-words) or a context based on a word (skip-gram). As the weights… Continue reading Digital Doxography and the Memory of Philosophy →

This post was prompted by Noam Chomsky’s personal reflections on the history of the last 70 years of linguistics (Chomsky 2021). It’s a nice piece if - like me - you’re into that kind of thing but it repeats what I take to be a misrepresentation of Zellig Harris’s work. I’ll get to the exact… Continue reading Zellig Harris, a correction →

With lockdown wearing on, my occasional walks outside took on a more epic feel. I think many of us felt something like this. Perhaps the new found sense of risk rarified the landscape. I took to photographing tree stumps in the style of Ansel Adams. I can't say I really captured the style - I… Continue reading Mesas and the mundane →

Here's a piece of music that has been described as a sign that I obviously hate pianists and wish for them to suffer. That isn't strictly true. But if you're in quarantine and want to hurt your fingers in the service of some noise, fill your boots:  A Minor Etude If you're wondering if the… Continue reading Music (Almost) →

Here's a little thing I wrote on Liam Ó Rinn's translation of the Irish national anthem. It's not exactly a scholarly work, in fact, it existence is almost exclusively a result of a recent bout of insomnia. The anthem gets a rough time but I think that Ó Rinn's translation is truly impressive and thought it… Continue reading Amhrán na bhFiann →