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Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

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131–140 of 178 posts

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

#131
post #19
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

There could be a bias in the summary writers too, in that they prefer "he murders" and "she poisons" for the same method of killing.

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

#132
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that isn't the OED's definition of sexism. The word already has a specific meaning. > Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex. You seem to be making it more specific to exclude things you don't deem important.

> The word already has a specific meaning. The definition is so broad as to be meaningless. Even having different boxing (the sport) categories for men and women could be construed as "sexism". Much less any implication that men and woman can have, as genders, different sensibilities and priorities, and not just because they were "raised that way" but also because of biological imperatives. E.g. something that we kno…

> Even having different boxing (the sport) categories for men and women could be construed as "sexism".

It absolutely is. And that's a good thing.

And boxing's weight classes are weight-ist. Also a good thing.

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

#133
post #115

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…

I did something like this in a project for my former work at a research group, and it was very difficult to visualize due to the number of variables we needed to communicate in the visualization. What we were trying to do was use word2vec to model changes in relationships between 700 proteins and one in particular, which is related to cancer/tumor growth. We created multiple word2vec models based on year windows of m…

Thanks, that's helpful! And you can email me at at gmail.com.

I'm also curious if there are any ways to quantify, mathematically, the changes over time. There's the simple sum of the squares of the changes distance to get a sense of the "kinetic energy" of the system, but I'm wondering if there are some more clever analyses, especially something that can quantify localized changes versus global changes.

Edit: so are you running a separate word2vec thing for each year's dataset? If so, how to you map between them, because the orientation the word2vec mapping generates will be random, and I worry that trying to rotate the mappings to some common axis could obscure some of the data.

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

#135

> I think this paints a somewhat dark picture of gender roles within typical story plots. Women are more likely to be in the role of victims- “she screams”, “she cries”, or “she pleads.” Men tend to be the aggressor: “he kidnaps” or “he beats”. How's that different from actual real life beatings, murders and kidnappings? Aren't men usually the aggressors?

> It’s interesting to compare this to an analysis from the Washington Post of real murders in America. Based on this text analysis, a fictional murderer is about 2.5X as likely to be male than female, but in America (and likely elsewhere) murderers are about 9X more likely to be male than female. This means female murderers may be overrepresented in fiction relative to reality.

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

#136
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That plot would fit into, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which had a viewship in the millions) no problem. Also, if you're going to say things like "natural difference between men and women that are implicitly understood by people" (down thread), you're going to have to bring some double-blind, peer-reviewed evidence. This is a controversial subject that's overflowing with armchair sociologists. Right now you're indi…

> Also, if you're going to say things like "natural difference between men and women that are implicitly understood by people" (down thread), you're going to have to bring some double-blind, peer-reviewed evidence. Millenia of history is a kind of evidence. And the main answer back is "this history is the history of an oppression". Which doesn't even go to why would (all things being equal) one gender get to be the o…

Natural differences are things like 'mean height', and the ability to get pregnant.

It is quite reasonable that past societies divided labor based on suitability of physical capacities for different tasks. It wouldn't be reasonable to call this 'oppression' per se.

However the structure of roles human societies has always been mediated by the level of technology. Gender divisions of labor, class and caste systems etc, have always shifted when the technological structure of production and warfare have changed as technology has developed.

Reinforcing roles that were developed in a less advanced technological society but are not necessary in the present landscape is most certainly oppression, as is resisting thought that could lead to more freedom for groups you don't belong to.

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

#137
post #68

People who have poor understanding of human nature will consider this an evidence of sexism. Think for a minute about why "Fifty shades of grey" is popular among female readers. If there are many stories are filled with males competing over resources and women (in the form of violent criminals kidnapping women and brave heroes rescuing them) then might it be that these kinds of stories are what people are looking for…

Unfortunately, every single difference of any significance is often took to be sexist and (of course) wrong sexist. Why are the top 100 chess players men? Sexism. Why are there more male than female programmers? Sexism. In non-romance movies, why are there more male leads? Sexism. There is legitimate wrongful sexism, but they aren't usually found in first world countries. It's as if we ever agreed there was a signifi…

Right - there's no wrongful sexism in first world countries and there is no difference in the messages males and females are given during their upbringing about how they should behave in society.

Also, family courts make perfectly fair decisions.

/s

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

#138
post #93
post #68

People who have poor understanding of human nature will consider this an evidence of sexism. Think for a minute about why "Fifty shades of grey" is popular among female readers. If there are many stories are filled with males competing over resources and women (in the form of violent criminals kidnapping women and brave heroes rescuing them) then might it be that these kinds of stories are what people are looking for…

Actually there are lots of strong female leads now. It all started, I think, with Joss Whedon (Buffy) and Robert Taper (Xena). Women used to watch that much more than Hercules etc. Now here is the thing... this is all wishful thinking. And the strong female lead is very much exceptional and stereotyped. She is just really strong and skilled somehow. Nearly all the other women are still weak. Once in a while her skill…

The 100

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

#139
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that isn't the OED's definition of sexism. The word already has a specific meaning. > Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex. You seem to be making it more specific to exclude things you don't deem important.

> The word already has a specific meaning. The definition is so broad as to be meaningless. Even having different boxing (the sport) categories for men and women could be construed as "sexism". Much less any implication that men and woman can have, as genders, different sensibilities and priorities, and not just because they were "raised that way" but also because of biological imperatives. E.g. something that we kno…

> Even having different boxing (the sport) categories for men and women could be construed as "sexism".

I disagree that fits under prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination. But of course it can be overly broad if you apply it overly broadly.

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

#140
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did something like this in a project for my former work at a research group, and it was very difficult to visualize due to the number of variables we needed to communicate in the visualization. What we were trying to do was use word2vec to model changes in relationships between 700 proteins and one in particular, which is related to cancer/tumor growth. We created multiple word2vec models based on year windows of m…

Thanks, that's helpful! And you can email me at at gmail.com. I'm also curious if there are any ways to quantify, mathematically, the changes over time. There's the simple sum of the squares of the changes distance to get a sense of the "kinetic energy" of the system, but I'm wondering if there are some more clever analyses, especially something that can quantify localized changes versus global changes. Edit: so are…

Sent! Yeah, we made a model for each year's dataset. In our case, we were only interested in the similarity between our target protein and the others, so we used the model's similarity measure between those in order to avoid problems with varying orientations between models.
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