TY - JOUR TI - Machine Learning and Human Perspective AU - Underwood, Ted T2 - PMLA AB - Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned with exploring differences of interpretation than with describing the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to reexamine the assumption that numbers are useful only for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually bad at being objective and rather good at absorbing human perspectives implicit in the evidence used to train them. To dramatize perspectival uses of machine learning, I train models of genre on groups of books categorized by historical actors who range from Edwardian advertisers to contemporary librarians. Comparing the perspectives implicit in their choices casts new light on received histories of genre. Scientific romance and science fiction—whose shifting names have often suggested a fractured history—turn out to be more stable across two centuries than the genre we call fantasy. (TU) DA - 2020/// PY - 2020 DO - 10.1632/pmla.2020.135.1.92 DP - mlajournals.org (Atypon) VL - 135 IS - 1 SP - 92 EP - 109 J2 - PMLA LA - en SN - 0030-8129 UR - https://www.mlajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1632/pmla.2020.135.1.92 Y2 - 2020/03/14/06:29:48 KW - DH Digital humanities KW - DH Distant reading ER -