Culture, its evolution and anything inbetween
I’m currently working on a long article in which I review two recent critiques of computational criticism (one by Nan Z. Da and the other by Franco Moretti and Oleg Sobchuk). Moretti and Sobchuk introduce cultural evolution into their discussion, but don’t say much about it, and I’m suspect that their audience, and mine, is … Continue reading “A quick guide to cultural evolution for humanists”
Next year at EvoLang, I’m doing a short session on public engagement in Language Evolution. As part of this, I have been given a small part of the poster session to have a little exhibition/discussion corner about public engagement initiatives. As such, I am now recruiting contributions that outline existing initiatives. Contributions will use the … Continue reading “Call for Contributions: Public Engagement in Language Evolution session”
This is a guest post by Angarika Deb. Sexual Selection theory, though much celebrated, has faced criticism since its inception. A new model now proposes sexual reproduction and reproductive social behaviour to be cooperative instead of competitive, as was initially advocated earlier by Darwin. After the sensational theory of natural selection, Darwin outlined the theory … Continue reading “Evolution: Is sex really even sexual?”
By corpus I mean a collection of texts. The texts can be of any kind, but I am interested in literature, so I’m interested in literary texts. What can we infer from a corpus of literary texts? In particular, what can we infer about history? Well, to some extent, it depends on the corpus, no? … Continue reading “Notes toward a theory of the corpus, Part 1: History”
Back in March 2014, Hedvig Skirgård and I wrote a post about the Great Language Game. Today we’ve published those results in PLOS ONE, together with the Game’s creator Lars Yencken. One of the fundamental principles of linguistics is that speakers that are separated in time or space will start sound different, while speakers who … Continue reading “Biggest linguistics experiment ever links perception with linguistic history”
It’s International Women’s day! Language Evolution is a largely male dominated discipline: women account for only 8 out of the top 100 most cited authors, and only 14 out of 82 invited speakers at the Evolution of Language Conference (see here). To promote the contribution of women to our field, we’ve compiled a list of 100 … Continue reading “Women in Language Evolution”
If you’ve heard of Dan Everett at all, most likely you’ve heard about his work among the Pirahã and his battle with Noam Chomsky and the generative grammarians. He went into the Amazon to live among the Pirahã in the mid-1970s with the intention of learning their language, translating the Bible into it, and converting … Continue reading “An Open Letter to Dan Everett about Literary Criticism”
I’ve uploaded another document: Sharing Experience: Computation, Form, and Meaning in the Work of Literature. You can download it from Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/28764246/Sharing_Experience_Computation_Form_and_Meaning_in_the_Work_of_Literature It’s considerably revised from a text I’d uploaded a month ago: Form, Event, and Text in an Age of Computation. You might also look at my post, Obama’s Affective Trajectory in His Eulogy … Continue reading “Sharing Experience: Computation, Form, and Meaning in the Work of Literature”
I’ll be appearing at Nineworlds convention as part of Stephanie Rennick’s panel on “Lessons for Academia from Computer Games”. The idea is to talk about ways in which games have informed our research, and here’s some of the things I’ll mention: Minecraft shows us how language evolved How were the very first languages created? How … Continue reading “Language Evolution and Gaming at Nineworlds”
A large part of human humour depends on understanding that the intention of the person telling the joke might be different to what they are actually saying. The person needs to tell the joke so that you understand that they’re telling a joke, so they need to to know that you know that they do … Continue reading “I know (1) that you think (2) it’s funny, and you know (3) that I know (4) that, too.”
