launchd(list)

Welcome to launchd, a blog about some of the background processes that shape the study of literature here at UMass Amherst. Along with courses on medieval literature, paleography, and medieval Latin, I regularly teach a course on data science for humanities students. My field of expertise, philology, requires thorough and rigorous searches of text corpora. Natural Language Processing helps us to discover patterns in large corpora.

My main interest these days is in how we understand poetic utterances in their historical and social contexts. I wrote a parser of Old English that finds the parts of speech of (untagged) OE. I hope to augment it so that it will produce semantic field maps. Perhaps I can correlate those maps to maps generated from Latin texts and discover areas of artistic influence, and the transmission of written images (the red rose, the sturdy oak) and figures of speech.

  • The Best Pop Song Ever!
    I found the top 50 words in all the #1 pop hits listed in Billboard magazine from 1965 to 2015. Unfiltered (including prepositions, conjunctions, etc): [(‘you’, 8353), (‘i’, 7882), (‘the’, 7083), (‘me’, 4277), (‘and’, 4068), (‘a’, 3873), (‘to’, 3869), (‘it’, 3796), (‘my’, 3529), (‘in’, 2650), (‘im’, 2593), (‘that’, 2431), (‘on’, 2224), (‘your’, 2091), (‘up’, 2085), (‘like’,… Read more: The Best Pop Song Ever!
  • Semantics in the Old English Poetic Line
    The case of Maldon During an Independent Study on the Battle of Maldon this week, we noticed that in lines 109 and 110, the weapons of war were named in the third lift. The verbs were in the fourth: A lift is another term for one of the four heavily weighted syllables in the OE… Read more: Semantics in the Old English Poetic Line
  • Block China on UNIX
    There are some very good scripts to modify IP Tables that will block unwanted traffic from getting anywhere with UMass servers. Some of the most aggressive hacking attempts are coming from China. Here is an automated hacking script trying to connect to my UMass box through ssh about every two seconds. Note the fake user… Read more: Block China on UNIX
  • Old English word shape
    Crosswords are intriguing programming problems. How do you generate a New-York-Times-style crossword puzzle from a list of words? During an attempt (in Old English of course), I noticed some very interesting features of Old English words. Consider the upper-left section of the crossword puzzle. An easy solution to generating words is to map the phonological… Read more: Old English word shape
  • Update on a Parser-Tagger of Old English
    Ottawa, Ontario 5 April 2019 Method Over the last eight months my approach to tagging an untagged sentence of Old English has been three-fold. First, I perform a simple look-up using four dictionaries (Bosworth-Toller, Clark-Hall, Bright’s glossary, a glossary of OE poetry from Texas), then save the results. Second and independently, I run the search-term… Read more: Update on a Parser-Tagger of Old English

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This blog is haphazardly maintained by Steve Harris, Department of English & adjunct professor in the Department of German and Scandinavian Studies. Former Professor of Old English at Mount Holyoke College.

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