Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 32, No. 158.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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    [1]    From: Bill Benzon 
           Subject: AUGUSTINE'S PATH: A note on virtual reading  (17)

    [2]    From: Bill Benzon 
           Subject: Computation, Semantics, and Meaning: Adding to an Argument by Michael Gavin  (20)


--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2018-11-03 18:53:56+00:00
        From: Bill Benzon 
        Subject: AUGUSTINE'S PATH: A note on virtual reading 

I’ve got a short piece up at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/37605244/AUGUSTINES_PATH_A_note_on_virtual_reading_and_an_example_of_the_hermeneutics_of_screwing_around

AUGUSTINE'S PATH: A note on virtual reading & an example of the hermeneutics of screwing around
Abstract: Andrew Piper analyzed the large-scale narrative structure of Augustine’s Confessions using a vector space semantic model. The 13 books fell into two distinct cluster, one having 3 books, the other having 10. By treating his analysis as specifying a macro-scale (low resolution) path through that space, one can see that it consists of three loops of increasing size: 1-6, 6-10, 10-13. The last is by far the largest, and ‘points’ back toward the beginning point. I argue that we may interpret this as a path in the mind, where the mind is conceived as the high-dimensional state space of the brain.


Bill Benzon
bbenzon@mindspring.com

917-717-9841

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/ 
http://www.facebook.com/bill.benzon 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/ 
https://independent.academia.edu/BillBenzon 
http://www.bergenarches.com/#image1 


--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2018-11-03 18:50:57+00:00
        From: Bill Benzon 
        Subject: Computation, Semantics, and Meaning: Adding to an Argument by Michael Gavin 

I’ve got a new working paper out:

Computation, Semantics, and Meaning: Adding to an Argument by Michael Gavin

Abstract: Michael Gavin has published an article in which he uses ambiguity as a theme for juxtaposing close reading, a standard procedure in literary criticism, with vector semantics, a newer technique in statistical semantics with a lineage that includes machine translation. I take that essay as a framework of adding computational semantics to the comparison, which also derives from machine translation. After recounting and adding to Gavin’s account of 18 lines from Paradise Lost I use computational semantics to examine Shakespeare “The expense of spirit”. Close reading deals in meaning, which is ontologically subjective (in Searle’s usage) while both vector semantics and computational semantics are ontologically objective (though not necessarily objectively true, a matter of epistemology).

Download at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3235001
Download at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/37261264/Computation_Semantics_and_Meaning_Adding_to_an_Argument_by_Michael_Gavin

Bill Benzon
bbenzon@mindspring.com

917-717-9841

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/ 
http://www.facebook.com/bill.benzon 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/ 
https://independent.academia.edu/BillBenzon 
http://www.bergenarches.com/#image1 



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