Stop Press! 🧵The Living Machine! 🤖 New OA Article in Technology & Culture (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/903976) by @danielwilson et al., using a language model to explore 19th century texts #history #dh 1/n...
Researchers from the 'Living with Machines' project examined long-standing issues in the history of technology about the trope of the living machine and its slippery figurative language. #histtech 2/n...
Are machines alive like us? Or are they lifeless bits of metal? The language and metaphors we use really matter because they shape how we see the place of machines in our world: it's political. 3/n...
Although we know machines aren't alive, we often speak as though they are: they move, they work, and now they chat as well. In a self-reflexive move, we created our own living machine - a language model trained on 19th century books from the British Library. 4/n...
Could it help us find metaphors and turns of phrase that would elude simple keyword search? Yes! We used this 'figurative search' to discover such phrases in a large corpus of books and newspapers. 5/n
Not only that, but we can discover change-over-time by training our model ('BLert') on texts from specific time periods. We hope these experiments will inspire others to try the same using their own data. 6/n
Our code and models are open and accessible here: https://github.com/Living-with-machines/TheLivingMachine. Please get in touch as we continue developing tools, methods and infrastructure for new computational research in the humanities. 7/n
