Respond to each post own words 50 words

(post 1)

How I’m discovering the secrets of ancient texts.

In this talk, Heyworth (2015) explains how he changed the direction of his career when he came to the realization that what he had been teaching so far was just a mere partial knowledge of human history. That is how he became a textual scientist to uncover dead ancient transcripts and maps using innovative technologies such as multispectral imaging.

Heyworth observes that all around the world exist transcripts that could significantly change the history of world culture. In fact, there are many writings that we have not been able to read due to "water damage, fading, mold and chemical reagents". Those unknown texts could drastically change our knowledge of the past in subjects ranging from literature, history, to philosophy, music and so on. Basically, our cultural identities as we know it could be completely transformed by those unknown works.

This talk illustrates how literature and technology are closely interlinked. What I have learned from this talk, relate to the question of the relationship between technology and literature. In other words: does literature impacts technology or does technology impacts literature?

In my opinion technology and literature influence each other. In fact, literature and technology are both works of the creative human imagination, thus they are destined to overlap. In one hand, technology is a subject of literature which follows culture. On the other hand, technology heavily impacts culture. For instance, in the case of textual scientists, unknown writings pushed specialists of literature to use innovative technologies to be able to read those writings. And those writings, that were at first undiscovered will now influence literature in profounds ways.  

References:

Heyworth, G. (2015). How I'm discovering the secrets of ancient texts [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/gregory_heyworth_how_i_m_discovering_the_secrets_of_ancient_texts

(post2)

The literature I choose for this week’s discussion is ‘When robots read books’ by Inderjeet Mani.  For me this passage was extremely informative and magnifies the power of artificial intelligence, specifically in literature. Mani starts with the turn in literary studies, which was approximately after the 1970’s. This was the time period in which new enlightenment was being crafted on historical literature, by thinkers, philosophers and machine learning as well.

He first gives an in-depth examination of the machines or programs that use the artificial intelligence. He explains that “Most contemporary applications of AI consist of sophisticated methods for learning patterns, often through the creation of labels for large, unwieldy data-sets based on structures that emerge from within the data itself.AI remains concerned with formal patterns, but can nonetheless illuminate key aspects of narrative, including time, space, characters and plot.” He also says that Algorithms excel at sifting through large amounts of data and are becoming capable of decomposing entanglements of characters’ relationships.

One of the most interesting things I learned from this passage was the concept of this technology. Mani describes how analysis involves what’s known as ‘supervised’ machine learning, in which algorithms train themselves from collections of texts that a human has laboriously labeled.

He then shows the comparisons to human understanding versus artificial intelligence comprehensions of events, as it relates to literature. He mentions specifically some situations in which readers can and cannot thrive in comprehension of texts versus machines capacity do the same.

He also speaks of how humans can use tactics such as historical relevance, prior knowledge, background, emotions and more tools when analyzing literature. The possibility for machines to do so is also mentioned. One of his biggest points of emphasis here was the fact that machines are exponentially faster at analyzing scripts/literature faster than the traditional human method. In fact one of his headlines in the passage reads “They can discover trajectories from a database of 1,300 novels – this would take literary scholars a huge amount of time “. Before artificial intelligence programs, finding and examining the morphologies of folklore took years of careful reading and analysis.

From the machine learning, he tells the grave benefits as well as some down falls. The last two paragraphs really sum this up with examples of AI in use and show ways it can transform the future of literary analysis. From what i learned this technology relates to the issue of human capability vs machine learning and how they should interconnect to continue technological advancements and enlightenment. I believe that a balance of both would solve this issue.

- Week Two Discussion

Contains unread posts

(post 3)

The TED talk by Gregory Heyworth provided an interesting look into the past through literary works. He developed a technique that allows him to recover historic and even ancient text, which is called multispectral imaging. This technique uses 12 wavelengths of light that range from ultraviolet to infrared and are shown on a document from above and below, using a high-powered camera to capture an image (Heyworth, 2015). The image is then processed using software designed for sharpening satellite images, which produces amazing and profound results that open a door to the past and to the creation of a piece that could be hundreds of years old (Heyworth, 2015).

Today, and in more recent history, one way we learn about the past is by uncovering and finding documents that were forgotten. Some of these documents, books, and manuscripts have not been well preserved and therefore are damaged or have been written over through the years. Multispectral imaging allows us the potential to discover pieces of history that could have been lost forever. It could reshape certain cultures; redefine what we know about groups of people and even religion as a whole. I think this technology is vastly important to historic literature in relation to preservation and learning about our written history.

Reference:

Heyworth, G. (2015, October). How I'm discovering the secrets of ancient texts. Retrieved from TED: https://www.ted.com/talks/gregory_heyworth_how_i_m_discovering_the_secrets_of_ancient_texts#t-305718