asphericalcritic

let the crows into your heart

  • she/her

lyra; poet, critic, letterpress enthusiast

lover of crows, myth, metamorphosis, crows, tea, birds, nature, shadows, crows, crows
(i frequently share nsfw posts, fyi!)


v21
@v21

I asked Lotaria if she has already read some books of mine that I lent her. She said no, because here she doesn't have a computer at her disposal.

She explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the list of all the words contained in the text, in order of frequency. 'That way I can have an already completed reading at hand," Lotaria says, "with an incalculable saving of time. What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings? An electronic reading supplies me with a list of the frequencies, which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggests to my critical study. Naturally, at the highest frequencies the list records countless articles, pronouns, particles, but I don't pay them any attention. I head straight for the words richest in meaning; they can give me a fairly precise notion of the book."


asphericalcritic
@asphericalcritic

calvino also has a lecture that touches on some of the same ideas entitled, "cybernetics and ghosts," which i still think about.


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in reply to @v21's post:

That first frequency list has "do" and "it" both appearing 20 times, and I honestly don't even think that's possible for a natural-seeking book of any significant length lol

Good passage though. Suggests some potentially interesting challenges, like only using most words once. And I definitely get where you're coming from with LLM tag, but at least this is dumb arithmetic that you still have to apply your own brain to for interpretation. It just may not mean anything in the first place haha

Calvino, being a novelist and not a digital humanist, felt free to compose the word lists for the sake of prose rather than statistics. I can get into the differences with the present day, but I do enjoy the way this echoes, almost 50 years later.

i'm not a fetishist of the printed page given who gets to get their book out there is inherently biased and a lot of terrible shit gets published but this... sounds cool but would be impossible to parse meaning from, even though it's basically how i remember the books that were too adult for me as a child. how would this work? hello from a rando btw.

As described, the method of analyzing texts is too superficial to infer very much of a novel's meaning, but if Lotaria really delved into realistic natural language analysis it would demand a comical amount of background knowledge from a reader (or at least be ridiculously longwinded and pace-destroying) without making the point of the passage any clearer. Sometimes accurate technical information in fiction is good, sometimes it's a distraction.