Description: Using large digital libraries to advance literary history
Search The Stone and the Shell Using large digital libraries to advance literary history Menu About this blog Open data Tech note Ted Underwood Search Search for: Close search Close Menu About this blog Open data Tech note Ted Underwood Categories deep learning fiction Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction Post author By tedunderwood Post date March 19, 2023 23 Comments on Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction Language models have been compared to parrots, but the bigger dang
But there are ways to use language models actively and creatively. We can select evidence to be analyzed, put it in a prompt, and specify the questions to be asked. Used this way, language models can create new knowledge that didn’t exist when they were trained. There are many ways to do this, and people may eventually get quite creative. But let’s start with a familiar task, so we can evaluate the results and decide whether language models really help. An obvious place to start is “content analysis”—a rese
Below I work through a simple example of content analysis using the OpenAI API to measure the passage of time in fiction (see this GitHub repo for code). To spoil the suspense: I find that for this task, language models add something valuable, not just because they’re more accurate than older ways of doing this at scale but because they explain themselves better.
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