Chris Forster
LightNews LightNews
cforster.bsky.social
Chris Forster
@cforster.bsky.social
510 followers 260 following 61 posts
Associate English Prof., Syracuse University.

Interested in modernism, history of media, obscenity, and computational approaches to literary studies (uh, fine *digital humanities*).

https://cforster.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
cforster.bsky.social
An interesting parenthetical comment in this NYRB review of two books on China’s communist party. [Link: www.nybooks.com/articles/202... ]
(One way to counter this would be to archive all URLs via the Internet Archive, www.archive.org, and then cite the archived link. Indeed editors should accept only archived URLs and not the current practice of saying when a link was accessed—a useless piece of information that does not prove that a deleted page existed.)
July 11, 2025 at 2:50 PM
cforster.bsky.social
But "a dog in the bucket is worth three in the lake" gets you close enough in the latent space of digested idioms, that the models, in effect, "snaps to grid" and reads it as "a bird in the hand..."
Google search for "'a dog in the bucket is worth three in the lake' meaning." AI overview reports: "The saying "a dog in the bucket is worth three in the lake" is a proverb meaning it's better to stick with what you have than to risk losing it by trying to get something better. It's a cautionary warning against the allure of potentially better options, emphasizing that having something, even if it's not ideal, is better than potentially losing it all." And then offers links and further summary for a "more detailed explanation."
April 23, 2025 at 2:37 PM
cforster.bsky.social
I've enjoyed watching this meme this morning b/c it gives real insight into how these models work (and fail). This (funny) trick only works with things that are idiomatic-ish. "the population of a berry meaning," for instance, doesn't.
A google search for the phrase "the population of a berry," where the AI Overview reports: "The phrase "the population of a berry" doesn't have a standard or widely understood meaning. It likely refers to the number of individuals, or the number of seeds or fruits, within a cluster or area of a berry-producing plant. However, the phrase is not commonly used and could be misunderstood."
April 23, 2025 at 2:34 PM
cforster.bsky.social
Working with HathiTrust data; I want to normalize a result based on number of titles per year. Is there a standard method/source for this?

I summed titles per year from HathiFiles metadata, using rights_date_used field and got a result that looks like:
Line graph estimating the number of titles in HathiTrust per year. The x-axis covers the years 1700 - 2024; the y-axis goes from 0 to 250,000. The plot trends upward, and grows steeper after 1800. There is dip around the years 1920-1950 (war years?) and then a quick acceleration to a maximum value in 1999. The plot then quickly falls off.
December 13, 2024 at 10:11 PM