Magic and its Limits: Computational Categorization and Magical Gems, Professor Laure Thompson, UMASS

Date
Thu November 11th 2021, 12:00 - 1:00pm
Event Sponsor
Humanities Center, Department of Classics
Location
Virtual
Magic and its Limits: Computational Categorization and Magical Gems, Professor Laure Thompson, UMASS

Dr. Thompson presents an investigation of how image-based computational methods can be used to study the modern category of Graeco-Roman "magical gems".

About the Speaker(s): Dr. Laure Thompson is an assistant professor in the College of Information & Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of UMass NLP. Her research bridges machine learning and natural language processing with humanistic scholarship. She builds tools and creates methodologies that enable scholars to use machine learning and statistical methods for studying humanities collections at scale. Her research focuses on understanding what computational models actually learn and how we can intentionally change what they learn. Since her work is centered on humanities applications, she works with a wide range of cultural heritage corpora: from texts of science fiction novels and medieval manuscripts to images of avant-garde journals and magical gems from the ancient Mediterranean.

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