Nicholas Dames

Bio: Nicholas Dames is an academic researcher from Columbia University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Temporality & Chunking (psychology). The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 3 publications receiving 294 citations.

Extracting Social Networks from Literary Fiction

Abstract: We present a method for extracting social networks from literature, namely, nineteenth-century British novels and serials. We derive the networks from dialogue interactions, and thus our method depends on the ability to determine when two characters are in conversation. Our approach involves character name chunking, quoted speech attribution and conversation detection given the set of quotes. We extract features from the social networks and examine their correlation with one another, as well as with metadata such as the novel's setting. Our results provide evidence that the majority of novels in this time period do not fit two characterizations provided by literacy scholars. Instead, our results suggest an alternative explanation for differences in social networks.

Nostalgia and its disciplines: A response:

Abstract:   ̓          ,        ,         . [But we two will drink and feast in the hut, and will take delight in each other’s wretched sorrows as we remember them. For in after time a man can even delight in grief, whoever has suffered greatly and wandered far.] (Homer, 1995: 15.398–401; translation mine)

Trollope’s Chapters

Abstract: The unit of the chapter – so fundamental to nineteenth-century prose narrative, yet so thoroughly ignored in accounts of the form of novels – is fundamental to Anthony Trollope’s work. The chapter stems from the textual practices of antiquity and of medieval biblical transmission, ultimately finding a home in the novel form. Chapters are key to Trollope’s understanding of readerly experience, in that they both license and manage the occasional inattention of the reader, while tacitly permitting an interplay between reading and not-reading; they are also key to his understanding of the temporality of personal experience, which is based on the bounded unit known as the “episode.”

The past is a foreign country.

Abstract: 'When I was your age,' my father was fond of telling me, 'I used to walk 5 miles through a foot of snow just to go to school.' I was impressed for a while, until I noticed that, as he got older, the distance got longer and the snow got deeper. Eventually, he claimed to have walked 20 miles through 6 feet of snow. I became even more suspicious when I found out from my grandmother that they had lived three blocks from school. In an age of school buses and car-pooling parents, such stories, whether believable or not, conjure up visions of a world almost beyond the imaginations of today's children. I was reminded of that today by an email from my friend and Brandeis colleague Tom Pochapsky, who directed my attention to a fascinating article on the website of Beloit College (http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2014.php). Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, which provides a look at the cultural background of the students entering college that fall. The creation of Beloit's Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to the Beloit faculty to be aware of dated references. As the website notes, 'it quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation.' So what's the worldview of the class of 2014? According to the latest list, here are a few of the things these 18-year-olds, born in 1992, have experienced - and not experienced: • Few in the class know how to write in cursive. • They find that email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail. They text. Oh, God, do they text. • To them, Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive film director than as vigilante cop Dirty Harry. • For them, Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways. • They've never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day. • In their world, Czechoslovakia has never existed. There was no Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain is a meaningless phrase, and Russia has never had a Communist government. • There has never been a world without AIDS. • The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are classical music. • Toothpaste tubes have always stood up on their caps. • There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church. • Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing good to watch has always been the norm. • The US public has never approved of the job the US Congress is doing. • Most of them have never seen a long-playing record, or even a tape drive. If they have ever seen a typewriter, it was in a museum, possibly alongside a dial telephone. • They have never lived in a world without personal computers, the Internet, CD-ROMs or laser printers. There are, of course, many things they have experienced that we also experienced at the same age. Among these are automobiles, jet airplanes, color television sets, and the Chicago Cubs not having won the World Series. Another commonality has been the enduring hostility between the English and the French. But they couldn't imagine life without PopTarts, juice boxes, and movies you can have on your home TV, and they have no idea how we could have survived in a world that required carbon paper. All of which got me wondering: what would the scientific worldview be like for someone, let's say, just starting graduate school today (and therefore about 22 years of age)? Born in 1988, how would their scientific lives differ from the lives of the generations preceding them (including mine, which is the only one I really care about)? It makes for some interesting speculation: • For today's budding biologists, DNA fingerprinting would have always existed. Actual fingerprinting would have been a recent invention, used primarily to secure laptop computers. • Protein crystal structure determination would for them never be anything but a routine tool. • Molecular biology would never have been a discipline in its own right. Instead, it would always have been a set of techniques, introduced to students in better high schools. • They cannot imagine a world without kits to make experiments virtually automatic. • Since the first free-living organism had its genome sequenced when they were 7 years old, they have grown up in the age of genomics. They have had access to the complete sequence of the human genome since they were in middle school. • They have never attended a lecture given with slides from a carousel projector, and they may not have ever seen one given from overhead transparencies either. PowerPoint has been in use for virtually their entire lives. • In their lifetime, no one has ever pipetted anything by mouth. • DNA sequencing, peptide synthesis, chemical analysis, and gene synthesis have always been farmed out to specialty companies rather than done in one's own lab. • They have almost certainly never seen anyone blow glass. In fact, many of them may not know that test tubes were ever made of anything but plastic. • They have always had the option of going into the biotechnology industry. • The term 'enzyme' has always referred to both protein and RNA. • Evolution has always been under attack, and science and religion have largely been seen as incompatible. • There have always been 'big science' projects in biology. • Chemistry has always been a declining field in terms of student interest, and physics has always been the province of a small number of practitioners. • Believe it or not, they have never known a world without cDNA microarrays. • For them, 'Xerox' is a verb, Polaroid makes LCD TVs, and every piece of equipment is computer-controlled. • They have never requested a reprint. They probably don't know what one is. • They believe that no science was done before 2000. Any science not indexed on PubMed was not done either, even if it was done yesterday. • They cannot imagine that there once was only a single Cell journal, and just one Nature as well. I'm sure you could think of lots more. I know I could, but we had 10 feet of snow last night, and that 50-mile walk to school is going to take me a while.

Chameleons in Imagined Conversations: A New Approach to Understanding Coordination of Linguistic Style in Dialogs

Abstract: Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to each other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles and other function words in their next utterance in response to the number in their partner's immediately preceding utterance. This striking level of coordination is thought to have arisen as a way to achieve social goals, such as gaining approval or emphasizing difference in status. But has the adaptation mechanism become so deeply embedded in the language-generation process as to become a reflex? We argue that fictional dialogs offer a way to study this question, since authors create the conversations but don't receive the social benefits (rather, the imagined characters do). Indeed, we find significant coordination across many families of function words in our large movie-script corpus. We also report suggestive preliminary findings on the effects of gender and other features; e.g., surprisingly, for articles, on average, characters adapt more to females than to males.

The Past Is a Foreign Country - Revisited

Abstract: The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.

A Bayesian Mixed Effects Model of Literary Character

Abstract: We consider the problem of automatically inferring latent character types in a collection of 15,099 English novels published between 1700 and 1899. Unlike prior work in which character types are assumed responsible for probabilistically generating all text associated with a character, we introduce a model that employs multiple effects to account for the influence of extra-linguistic information (such as author). In an empirical evaluation, we find that this method leads to improved agreement with the preregistered judgments of a literary scholar, complementing the results of alternative models.

Feuding Families and Former Friends: Unsupervised Learning for Dynamic Fictional Relationships

Abstract: Understanding how a fictional relationship between two characters changes over time (e.g., from best friends to sworn enemies) is a key challenge in digital humanities scholarship. We present a novel unsupervised neural network for this task that incorporates dictionary learning to generate interpretable, accurate relationship trajectories. While previous work on characterizing literary relationships relies on plot summaries annotated with predefined labels, our model jointly learns a set of global relationship descriptors as well as a trajectory over these descriptors for each relationship in a dataset of raw text from novels. We find that our model learns descriptors of events (e.g., marriage or murder) as well as interpersonal states (love, sadness). Our model outperforms topic model baselines on two crowdsourced tasks, and we also find interesting correlations to annotations in an existing dataset.