Notices by Allison Parrish (aparrish@mastodon.social), page 6

@danima I mayyyy have run the generator a few times to get results that looked good :)

@Ranjit you know I had always read this meme as just being about amusing juxtapositions of unusual containers and unusual things contained, but now I understand that it's at least partially about the subtle melancholy of the salesman's mendacity and hubris at making such outrageous claims to close the sale

@ifixcoinops @technomancy speaking of Constellation Games and language, I helped Leonard write this: http://constellation.crummy.com/Pey%20Shkoy%20Benefits%20Humans/ a brief introduction to one of the book's languages

my original idea for the vowels was that they should be recognized not by mouth shape but by the ratio of frequencies produced by a series of separate vibrating membranes deep inside the Alien pulmonary system. but leonard decided that was too complicated, oh well

@Borogove i mean the monster does a lot of talking in the novel for sure, so your self-strangled statement is at least partially true

"trained" on _Frankenstein_. the idea of using a gaussian mixture model on the word vectors is to make it possible to predict words similar in meaning that aren't necessarily in the original text. I'm not sure if the variability in the text is due to (a) not enough data to really get the mixtures right (b) the lack of ability to control the degree of randomness in the sample function or (c) you shouldn't really do this kind of thing with word vectors

this is a little weird and worked a little better than I expected it to: using scikit-learn to fit gaussian mixtures to the vectors for all words following n-grams in the text, then doing nearest-neighbor lookups on the concatenated vectors for the n-grams, nearest-neighbor lookup on a sample from the mixture model, and chaining predictions like a markov chain

@abundance wordreference forum?

looking through the mla 2019 schedule for the first time and i'm actually really excited about going now? there is a session for example called "poetics and annotation"

@se "design your own markup language (and renderer for that markup language)" for this week in comptypo. i don't think it would have quite worked with the class structured as it is right now. but maybe next year if i decide to teach it again!

the frustration of coming up with a REALLY good homework assignment idea for a class session you've already taught 🙃

@RoofSlapping wow

you can play around with it here https://editor.p5js.org/allison.parrish/full/r1JEOsJpm

(lmk if you happen to know why sometimes it doesn't load the fonts? I thought that putting the actual css font-family property in the link tag's load callback would ensure everything was already loaded, but maybe not? but I haven't really had time to debug it)

@Ranjit bourbon or rye?

this morning in delicious typography crime, setting H.D.'s "Sea Rose" in randomly-selected fonts from Google Fonts

a short film on spell check and the materiality of the digital textual signifier

current professor status: I've had a presentation open in keynote for the past three weeks called "materiality of text" that so far only has one slide that just says "saussure" in big letters