Primrose Road

HyperHamlet is up and running. I saw an early version of this project presented at a conference in 2006, and its aims remain the same: it doesn't attempt to supply an edition in the sense of an editorial reconstruction, and it doesn't want to work backwards from the text. Instead, the project seeks to map the text forward, cataloguing references to Hamlet from all walks of life and culture. When I first heard about the project, I asked myself what cataloguing every reference to Hamlet ever could do for us. Interestingly, the project page now explains that such an endeavor can serve as not only a research database but also as a means of questioning the point of bookish editorial reconstructions. * Hattip to Shakespeare Geek, who found this before I did. *

"The FBI hunts down the most vicious criminals online," reads a half-page ad for the new thriller Untraceable, "but the most dangerous one is hunting them." I'll bet that in the world of American crime thrillers, the FBI hunts down criminals via Google searches. According to film and television, any and all information is available to us with a web browser and a couple of clever keystrokes. Computers never fail, except when they explode. On police/courtroom procedural dramas, often all it takes to catch a criminal is a simple search of a database of fingerprints, which never fails. And somehow, TV's fictional rendering of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit (Law and Order: SVU) is outfitted with gigantic hi-def flat screens that display information relevant to the case (a function served by simple marker-boards on the other two Law and Order series). Lawyers and court employees involved in jury selection have to worry about the CSI Effect because of the widespread belief that when it comes to criminal investigation, computers can do just about anything. No wonder today's college students think that Google and Wikipedia are all-powerful.

An essay in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "In Defense of Lurking," by Virginia Heffernan. Heffernan praises the practice of wandering from message board to message board without posting (or worrying about how to compose a post that won't be attacked as newbielike, trollish, or uninformed), of "read[ing] without writing; tak[ing] without giving." Americans are wracked with guilt over leisure time; we have to reconfigure everything as work, she writes, to the point that even readers of novels have to convince themselves that they're learning something, that they're somehow being productive. I'd write more, but I'm exhausted from the second-qualifying-exam crunch. To paraphrase a friend and fellow graduate student, some days blogging feels too much like homework. Let's go a-flaneuring through the Interweb of Unproductivity.

The Gender Genie purports to predict, with 80% accuracy, the gender of the author of any text inputted into a form. (Tip of the something-or-other to squib, who linked to this toy earlier this week.) It supposedly works according to an algorithm developed by a pair of computational linguists. The program searches for the following: feminine keywords: with, if, not, where, be, when, your, her, we, should, and, me, myself, hers, was. masculine keywords: around, what, more, are, as, who, below, is, these, the, a, at, it, many, said, above, to. So, the "Gender Genie" seems to hinge on the idea that women use conditionals and talk about themselves more often than men. There have indeed been studies that show that women -- for cultural, not biological reasons -- tend to make their statements sound less definite (with "if"s, "maybe"s, "likely"s, vocalized pauses, etc) and use personal pronouns more often when speaking. Does this algorithm (perhaps incorrectly) assume that women exhibit the same patterns in their writing? A columnist with The Guardian was surprised to find that the Gender Genie identified all but one of the paper's female columnists as male, yet it "correctly" identified all of the male columnists. In the interest of self-reflexivity, the Gender Genie identifies this post as having been written by a man, apparently because (I'm not kidding) I used the word "the" seventeen times.