Analyzing Text at the Middle Distance between the Close Read and Culturomics

Marti A. HearstU.C Berkeley

Joint Work with Aditi Muralidharan

Foreground: The Close Read

Middle Distance: Sensemaking

Background: Culturomics (Text Mining)

Definition: “Close Read”

“Close reading describes, in literary criticism, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words,

syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read.”

-English Wikipedia, 6/4/2012

“Power and Passion in Shakespeare’s PronounsInterrogating ‘you’ and ‘thou’”Penelope Freedman, 2007, MPG Books, 280 pp.

Scene from “As you like it” by Daniel Maclise (1806-70)

Conclusions (“Power and Passion of Shakespeare’s Pronouns”)

“The subtleties of the use of ‘you’ and ‘thou’ that have emerged … can seem, at worst, random or, at best,

unfathomable. …

A set of oppositions has been revealed here: … These oppositions are complex and slippery: they may operate

in parallel, may converge or diverge. Each pronoun choice has to be seen in a highly specific context.”

Definition: “Culturomics”

Narrower than “digital humanities” and broader than “corpus linguistics”.

( Loose interpretation of definitions at culturomics.org )

“Culturomics” example:middle distance vs. middle ground

As an NLP Researcher, where do your ideas come from?

Can HCI improve your work?

Sensemaking

• A vague information need

• Iteratively refine it by

• Searching

• Reading

• Analyzing

• Reach understandingPirolli and Card 2005, Pirolli and Russell 2011

Sensemaking for Literature Study

WordSeer (version 1)

The North American Pre-civil-war Slave Narratives

The North American Slave Narratives

• Stories of the lives of former slaves

• Published by white abolitionist sponsors

• About 3000 narratives survive

• ~300 in prototype

Do the north american slave narratives all conform to the

same stereotypes?

A “Master Plan” for the slave narratives

“... conventions so early and firmly established that one can imagine a sort of master outline drawn from the

great narratives and guiding the lesser ones”

-- Olney, J. “I was born: Slave Narratives and their Status as Autobiography”, Callaloo, 1984

Our approach

• Phase 1: Support searching for instances of conventions

• Phase 2: Support visualizing their occurrence in the collection

Searching for stereotypes

• Keyword search is not enough

• Search words: “cruel” “harsh” “overseer” “master” “mistress”

• Instead: “overseer” “master”, “mistress” described as “cruel”, “harsh”

• Also want the entire picture, for comparison

• “overseer” “master”, “mistress” described as ____?_____

• ___?_____ described as cruel

Natural language processing

The cruel overseer beat us severely.

object

subject

modifier

(automatically-extracted structure)

Grammatical search

• Prevalence

• Position of occurrence within a document

• Across the entire collection

Part 2: visualizing stereotypes

“I was born”

Results (presented at MLA 2012)

• Prevalent stereotypes

• “I was born”

• Separation from parents

• Cruel treatment

• Escape

• A ‘missed’ stereotype

• Parents’ death

• Not as strictly ordered as implied by Olney’s master plan.

Problems

• Vocabulary

• Same concept expressed with many different wordings

• Needed to see synonyms, nearby words, suggestions on searches

• Comparison and curation

• Couldn’t isolate and compare results on sub-collections of document

WordSeer (version 1.5)

wordseer.berkeley.edu

The complete works of Shakespeare

• 42 documents -- plays and sonnet collections

• 1589 -- 1612

Analyze Hamlet.

How does the portrayal of men and women in Shakespeare

change in different circumstances?

(CHI ’12 works in progress)

English 203:Hamlet in the Humanities Lab Spring 2012, University of Calgary

The Vocabulary Problem

Which words embody the concept of female beauty?

261 results

Collection and Comparison

Does the treatment of love vary between the comedies and tragedies?

Collection and Comparison

Step 2. Compare word usage

comedies tragedies

“in love”

comedies tragedies

Results

• WordSeer 1.5 being successfully used (so far) in Hamlet class

• How does the relationship between Hamlet and his mother change over the course of the play?

• How does Act 1 portray the character of Horatio?

• Investigated changing language use around men and women

• Unknowingly replicated and extended previous findings by other Shakespeare scholar

How Does This Apply to Social Media Language?

As an NLP Researcher, where do your ideas come from?

Can HCI improve your work?

Sentiment Analysis?

Sarcasm?

Summary

• We suggest enhancing NLP research with sensemaking tools to help with hypothesis formation

• Midway between reading the text and blind statistics.

• Helps with hypothesis formulation, verification, and refinement.

• This is clearly useful for literature analysis.

• It remains to be seen if it can help with social media analysis.

Thank you!