The Historical Significance of Textual Distances

Ted Underwood


Abstract
Measuring similarity is a basic task in information retrieval, and now often a building-block for more complex arguments about cultural change. But do measures of textual similarity and distance really correspond to evidence about cultural proximity and differentiation? To explore that question empirically, this paper compares textual and social measures of the similarities between genres of English-language fiction. Existing measures of textual similarity (cosine similarity on tf-idf vectors or topic vectors) are also compared to new strategies that strive to anchor textual measurement in a social context.
Anthology ID:
W18-4507
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Editors:
Beatrice Alex, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Feldman, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz
Venue:
LaTeCH
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
60–69
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4507
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ted Underwood. 2018. The Historical Significance of Textual Distances. In Proceedings of the Second Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 60–69, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Historical Significance of Textual Distances (Underwood, LaTeCH 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4507.pdf
Code
 tedunderwood/genredistance