{"id":2180,"date":"2015-04-05T09:54:31","date_gmt":"2015-04-05T14:54:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/winedarksea.org\/?p=2180"},"modified":"2025-02-10T17:29:57","modified_gmt":"2025-02-10T22:29:57","slug":"now-read-this-a-thought-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/?p=2180","title":{"rendered":"Now Read This: A Thought Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MRI\"<\/a>Let\u2019s say that we believe we can learn something more about what literary critics call \u201cauthorial style\u201d or \u201cgenre\u201d by quantitative work. We want to say what that \u201cmore\u201d is. We assemble a community of experts, convening a panel of early modernists to identify 10 plays that they feel are comedies based on prevailing definitions (they end in marriage), and 10 they feel are tragedies (a high born hero falls hard). To test these classifications, we randomly ask others in the profession (who were not on the panel) to sort these 20 plays into comedies and tragedies and see how far they diverge from the classifications of our initial panel. That subsequent sorting matches the first one, so we start to treat these labels (comedy\/tragedy) as \u201cground truths\u201d generated by \u201cdomain experts.\u201d Now assume that I take a computer program, it doesn\u2019t matter what that program is, and ask for it to count things in these plays and come up with a \u201crecipe\u201d for each genre as identified by our experts. The computer is able to do so, and the recipes make sense to us. (Trivially: comedies are filled with words about love, for example, while tragedies use more words that indicate pain or suffering.) A further twist: because we have an unlimited, thought-experiment budget, we decide to put dozens of early modernists into MRI machines<\/a> and measure the activity in their brains while they are reading any of these 20 plays. After studying the brain activity of these machine-bound early modernists, we realize that there is a distinctive pattern of brain activity that corresponds with what our domain experts have called \u201ccomedies\u201d and \u201ctragedies.\u201d When someone reads a comedy, regions A, B and C become active, whereas when a person reads tragedies, regions C, D, E, and F become active. These patterns are reliably different and track exactly the generic differences between plays that our subjects are reading in the MRI machine.<\/p>\n

So now we have three different ways of identifying \u2013 or rather, describing<\/em> \u2013 our genre. The first is by expert report: I ask someone to read a play and she says, \u201cThis is a comedy.\u201d If asked why, she can give a range of answers, perhaps connected to plot, perhaps to her feelings while reading the play, or even to a memory: \u201cI learned to call this and other plays like it \u2018comedies\u2019 in graduate school.\u201d The second is a description, not necessarily competing, in terms of linguistic patterns: \u201cThis play and others like it use the conjunction \u2018if\u2019 and \u2018but\u2019 comparatively more frequently than others in the pool, while using \u2018and\u2019 less frequently.\u201d The last description is biological: \u201cThis play and others like it produce brain activity in the following regions and not in others.\u201d In our perfect thought experiment, we now have three ways of \u201cgetting at genre.\u201d They seem to be parallel descriptions, and if they are functionally equivalent<\/em>, any one of them might just be treated as a \u201cpicture\u201d of the other two. What is a brain scan of an early modernist reading comedy? It is a picture of the speech act: \u201cThe play I\u2019m reading right now is a comedy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now the question. The first three acts of a heretofore unknown early modern play are discovered in a Folger manuscript, and we want to say what kind of play it is. We have our choice of either:<\/p>\n

\u2022 asking an early modernist to read it and make his or her declaration<\/p>\n

\u2022 running a computer program over it and rating it on our comedy\/tragedy classifiers<\/p>\n

\u2022 having an early modernist read it in an MRI machine and characterizing the play on the basis of brain activity.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say, for the sake of argument, that you can only pick one of these approaches. Which one would you pick, and why? If this is a good thought experiment, the \u201cwhy\u201d part should be challenging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s say that we believe we can learn something more about what literary critics call \u201cauthorial style\u201d or \u201cgenre\u201d by quantitative work. We want to say what that \u201cmore\u201d is. We assemble a community of experts, convening a panel of early modernists to identify 10 plays that they feel are comedies based on prevailing definitions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[130,13],"class_list":["post-2180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quant-theory","tag-classifiers","tag-genre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2180"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2183,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2180\/revisions\/2183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}