Alien Reading:

In Jeffrey Binder’s text, Alien Reading: Text Mining, Language Standardization, and the Humanities, I found that Binder brings up a lot of points that I have been interested in regarding technology, algorithms, and their relation to cultural, social, and political contexts.

A key quote that I want to respond to in Binder’s essay is: “If, as scholars, we are to engage with these technologies on our own terms, then we will have to find a way of making their roles in humanistic research a matter of active concern. Experimenting with text-mining programs in English departments could serve as a safeguard against the possibility that we unknowingly absorb these tools into our practice without reflecting on the assumptions about language and knowledge that underlie them and considering the effects they could have on our work.”

Two notable example that relate to this idea of standardizing language and text mining come to mind: Facebook “Trending” algorithms and the Microsoft “teen Twitter bot.” Both participate in this kind of keyword-association-response, but have created problematic readings of text. With the Microsoft bot, it had to be taken down because the text and data that it was being trained on, rapidly too a turn for the worst and started spewing anti-Semitic tweets. While this is a more extreme example, in that the data was ripe for being corrupted, the Facebook algorithms also contributed to this idea that algorithms had the “last word” and did not require this humanistic safeguarding.

A final note that was interesting to me was the investigation of poetic language and figurative, and how text mining and standardization make it difficult for literary scholars to be a part of the same conversation that highly technical writers can engage in regarding computerized text. The generation of phrases like “dat master slave negro massa slaves white black dis dey” from MALLET is concerning because it does seem to erase, or even render nonsensical, non-white and non-“standard” (whatever that term may mean) language.