English Prof Explores Machine Learning As Intersection With Humanities
Chronicle of Higher Education
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3/27/19
“It is important for humanists to know how machine learning works, not because we all need to use it, but because it will help us understand why the boundary between quantitative and qualitative reasoning is growing fuzzier. In the past, it was broadly right to assume that numbers couldn’t address the interpretive questions at the center of humanistic disciplines. Math might help scholars reason about literacy rates and book prices, for instance, but it couldn’t reveal much about literary judgment. The rules of that game have genuinely changed. We can see this as a threat, or as a new opening for adventurous questions about the past.”