WORD LAB is a learning group at Penn Libraries focused on text analysis in all disciplines. Unless noted otherwise on the schedule below, we meet every Thursday 12-1:30pm in 623 Van Pelt (Vitale II Media Lab, sixth floor). Our activities include:
- A discussion or workshop based on current research, with speakers virtually or in person
- Discuss an article or project previewed before the meeting
FALL 2019 SCHEDULE:
- Oct 10, 2019: Read and discuss Katherine Bode's upcoming review "Why you can't model away bias," of Ted Underwood's Distant Horizons (MLQ, 2020: PDF preprint available here)
- Oct 17, 2019: Read and discuss Ryan Cordell's “Q i-tjb the Raven: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously.” Book History 20 (2017) - open access available
- Oct 24, 2019: ** NO WORD LAB TODAY! **
- Oct 31, 2019: Read and discuss John Wilkerson, David Smith, and Nicholas Stramp's “Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures: A Text Reuse Approach.” American Journal of Political Science 59 (4), 2015
- Nov 7, 2019: Discuss Robin Sloan on "Writing With the Machine: GPT-2 and text generation" at the 2019 Roguelike Celebration (YouTube, 30 mins)
- Nov 14, 2019: ** LOCATION CHANGE: 247 VAN PELT ** Discuss Rachel Thomas's SciPy 2019 Keynote on "The New Era in NLP" (YouTube, 45 mins)
- Nov 21, 2019: ** LOCATION/TIME CHANGE: 526 VAN PELT at 2-3:30pm Amy Catalinac, NYU
- (No meeting on Nov 28 due to Thanksgiving)
- Dec 5, 2019: ** LOCATION CHANGE: 247 VAN PELT ** Discuss ETS automatic essay grading and bias (Read beforehand: Twitter thread, Vice Motherboard article (Aug 20, 2019), Vox Recode podcast transcript (Oct 20, 2019))
- Dec 12, 2019: Last meeting of the semester! Discuss OpenAI's new language models (Look at beforehand: OpenAI blog post (Feb 14, 2019) and a related Twitter thread, plus watch this TWiMLAI discussion (Feb 19, 2019), and check out Talk To Transformer)
See the SPEAKERS page for previous attendees and the READINGS page for our discussion readings!