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Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

varianceexplained.org

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Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#12
post #6

It's interesting how thoroughly ingrained sexist concepts are in the language. Even a verb that's fairly active like 'resist' assumes a power relation in which they are in a worse position. I'd like to see this done by country or year or language or genre.

Well, we're talking about gender here, not sex, and given that there are two genders [commonly represented in literature], it stands to reason that they would have different tendencies of behavior, or else there would be no difference between the genders, and the concept would not exist.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#14
post #4

The author failed to mention the context of the data chosen; specifically the dates. For example, rob vs. steal, would change depending on the century the work was created.

The author mentions in the second paragraph that the data comes from scraping Wikipedia articles' plot descriptions. So the plots might be old, but the descriptions (and language) were all written recently.

Hm. Wouldn't that have little bearing on the result? Can't really say "he poisons" when that wasn't the plot of the story.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#17

The reference at the end talking about comparing changes over time reminded me of a problem I've been kicking around. For this particular system that's not too hard, since you're putting each word on a one-dimensional femininity/masculinity scale, so you could plot a word on a line graph or something. But what do you do if you want to evaluate the changes of more complex relationships over time? Not just mapping word…

> With something like word2vec you can take a bunch of words and project the vector space onto a plane so you can see the relative distances, but how do you express changes over time?

Animate it?

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#18
post #6

It's interesting how thoroughly ingrained sexist concepts are in the language. Even a verb that's fairly active like 'resist' assumes a power relation in which they are in a worse position. I'd like to see this done by country or year or language or genre.

Is it sexist if it's reflective of reality? Men commit more aggressive crimes than women by far.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#19
post #14
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author mentions in the second paragraph that the data comes from scraping Wikipedia articles' plot descriptions. So the plots might be old, but the descriptions (and language) were all written recently.

Hm. Wouldn't that have little bearing on the result? Can't really say "he poisons" when that wasn't the plot of the story.

But that's the point. "She poisons" is more likely to be the plot of the story than "he poisons."
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