ASCII Fluid Dynamics, in music-video form: (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.)
Tag: text
Unwordy Analysis: Can You Identify Authors by Their Punctuation?
Can you identify who wrote a big chunk of text, if you remove all the words and examine only the punctuation. This new study says that in many cases yes, you can: “Pull Out All the Stops: Textual Analysis Via Punctuation Sequences,” Alexandra N.M. Darmon, Marya Bazzi, Sam D. Howison, and Mason Porter, SocArXiv. January […]
Ammo for Space Pedants: Are Two Spaces Better Than One?
There may be no safe space in the ongoing war, between scholars, about blank characters.[SPACE] The latest salvo is in the form of a published study.[SPACE,SPACE] You can look for yourself at the character spacing in the study itself: “Are Two Spaces Better Than One? The Effect of Spacing Following Periods and Commas During Reading,” […]
A look back at the Ig Nobel Prize-spurring Sokal hoax
The 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to the editors of the journal Social Text, for eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist. The “research” paper was “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” written by Alan […]
Words That, Taken Together Possibly Mean Something
The scholarly journal called Social Text has again published a paper that may seem to be a jumble of big words but may, conceivably be full of deep, clear, important meaning. The new study is: “S’More Inequality — The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education,” Bethany Moreton [pictured here], Social Text, 2014, Volume 32, Number 3 […]
Learning Quiz: The value of this beauty question
This week’s Learning-Quiz question: What, if anything, could the authors of this study possibly have hoped to learn from doing this study? The study is: “What is beautiful is good, even online: Correlations between photo attractiveness and text attractiveness in men’s online dating profiles“, Rebecca J. Brand, Abigail Bonatsos, Rebecca D’Orazio, Hilary DeShong, Computers in […]
Lipstick names — a textual analysis
Anyone who has attempted to combine the ‘Presentation of Self’ theories of Erving Goffman and the semiotic modelling methods of Roland Gérard Barthes with regard to the names of lipsticks, could well consult the work of professor Debra Merskin (of the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, US), who has categorised […]