I have been asked what hate speech is. It is not exactly hard to detect. Hate speech defames, belittles, or dehumanizes a class of people on the basis of certain inherent properties — typically race, ethnicity, gender or religion. Hate speech attributes to that class of people certain highly negative qualities taken to be inherent … Continue reading »
American culture
Art and the machined world
Much of early 20th-century art in the West was commentary on the massive technological developments of the late 19th century. Where, 100 years later, is the comparable 21st-century artistic response to the technological developments of the late 20th century? American artists a few generations ago, especially painters and photographers, portrayed the massive structures, machined objects, … Continue reading »
Word counts and what counts
A post back in June on “digital humanities” discussed the promises and perils of turning to “Big Data” to answer questions about American history. I focused there on a study that looked specifically at the history of American literature. A paper in Psychological Science this August uses the same tool – the Ngram function in … Continue reading »
Robert Bellah
The great scholar Robert N. Bellah, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at UC Berkeley and winner of the National Humanities Medal in 2000, died July 30. (He was also a colleague and friend.) Bellah’s seminal contributions range from analyses of Japanese society to a recent, epoch-spanning book on the history of religion. For many, and for … Continue reading »