Nan Z Da’s “Computational Case Against Computational Literary Studies” (CLS) in the latest Critical Inquiry has been making the rounds on my social media feed. It’s a thorough and inventive argument and I am impressed by its doggedness, cross-field erudition and commitment to its idea: she re-did studies, chased down data sets, and reconstructed analyses. […]
Category Archives: Text
The Waiting Game
Well, I’m still not ON the drugs. I’d expected it this week (because last week the doctor told me to expect it this week). But when you are taking a relatively new, hard core cancer drug, there are papers to file and bureaucratic procedures. First, there’s insurance. I have insurance through Quebec, but private insurance […]
Logic Functions Bonus Round for Synth Nerds
I learned about the XOR function, and pretty much everything I know about logic functions, from modular synthesis. Modular synthesis, like AI or any other media technology, works on a set of conventions ensconced in a set of standards. A modular synthesizer is basically an analog computer (this is a whole other post, which I […]
A Few Random Thoughts on the Politics of the Logic Functions
Burç Kostem pointed me me to this wonderful piece by Matteo Pasquinelli on the history of neural networks. In the middle, there’s a small historical detail that I never quite grasped before: In 1969 Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert’s book, titled Perceptrons, attacked Rosenblatt’s neural network model by wrongly claiming that a Perceptron (although a simple […]
Dynamic range compression isn’t “the problem” with music
Writers like Milner and a music business that still focuses on Top 40 charts are. In a recent New York Times piece, Greg Milner argues that the “loudness wars” and “listener fatigue” are the reasons that music isn’t as good as it used to be. Here are some reasons why he’s wrong: Milner’s greatest offence is devaluating […]
Rupert Cox
Another new feature. When I meet cool or interesting people, or hear a talk that I find particularly engaging in one way or another, I will make mention of them here with a link to their work. I may or may not be loquacious. So, first up is Rupert Cox, social anthropologist, who’s been doing […]
…and we’re back…
So that whole social media “platform” this was an interesting ride, wasn’t it? Turns out, nothing is ever free, the new captains of industry are as selfish and narrow minded as the old ones, and we are just the product. Oh wait, we knew that already: I submit that the materialist answer to the question — What […]