I train machine learning programs called neural networks - they work by looking at lists of data and then deducing their own rules about how to generate similar data. They’re used in everything from ad targeting to facial recognition to self-driving cars, but I use them for humor by giving them very silly datasets.
Usually in my experiment, I give the neural network an unfair dataset - like paint colors - and it tries its best, but ends up with something unintentionally weird, like a brownish color called Stanky Bean, or a bright blue color called Dad.
Fish biologist Colin Gross sent me a new dataset for the neural network, a list of the common names of 37,265 fish from fishbase.
But then, it got good at this. I mean, really really good at this. You may think these names are the neural network being weird? No. They are pretty much indistinguishable from actual fish common names because, let me tell you, fish biologists are the weird ones.
The rest of this post is going to be the neural network’s ode to its new best friends, the fish biologists. And, I am very lucky to have excellent drawings by the talented Max Graenitz who wanted to get in on the weird-fest.
Black Sea sweetlips Eastern Dear eel Oastern nose sucker Vermillion assfin Cuban fork head sucker Gempofloise sand flaky Vumberfish Gerpike dwarf monocle bream Wrink clown-shark Bluebanded smooth-eet Bluebacked tube-spot skate Wallare pipe-eyed parrotfish Moon-lined wad Kascopcan tonguefish Highfin stonebasher
Want to help with neural network experiments? For NaNoWriMo I’m crowdsourcing a dataset of novel first lines, after the neural network had trouble with a too-small dataset.
In the course the of the nineteenth century, many European countries mapped their national identities onto medieval history. Assertions of ancient originds had of course long served in many different places, to legitimize and fortify kingdoms, nations, and other collectivities. Such assertions supported desired for seamless historical continuity and homogeneous shared culture-and they often still do. Prior to the nineteenth century, Europeans often looked to ancient Rome as illustrative of their prestigious cultural heritage. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, Europe’s own Middle Ages came to serve the same function, offering the ideological advantage of ethnic goupings that could be mapped down directly onto contemporary European nations. Medieval Europe could thus sustain claims of relative superiority as well as difference. As the Middle Ages because a privileged site for expressions of national character and achievement, scholarly debates about the nature of medieval societies and their cultural legacies took on a poignantly political tinge.
The period in which Medieval studies became “national” coincides with a period in which colonialism also played a substantive role in definitions of a national identity in Europe. For many countries, this meant expanded efforts to control overseas territories; for others it meant the progressive loss of overseas holdings; for still others, it meant a new de facto identity as a “non-colonial” power. Colonialism, like medievalism presented European nations with contradictory discourses. Newly conquered territories appear alternately as unappealing and invaluable, “hell on earth” or “promised lands”; the medieval could represent the uncivilzed primitive or the ancient cultural presence od the modern nation. This shared oscillation between “positive” and “negative” valuations invites similar treatment of distant places and dis-[page ends]
S.J. Pierce on twitter shared this page from a very fascinating-looking academic book of essays on, well, medievalism and how it has been used in the post-colonial world. I see something like this and i immediately think of how the popularity of a show like Game of Thrones serves *our* particular present-what kind of violence today does this imagined “worse” past try to justify in our current sociopolitical climate? How does projecting colonial levels of violence, conflict, and atrocity onto the trappings we associate with a “medieval” and Eurocentric past affect our ideas and conceptualizations of the present?
It also makes me think on why so many white supremacists feel comfortable marching around, spewing hate and terrorizing communities of color in public, have felt so comfortable in medieval studies and brandishing symbols they consider “medieval” as if they somehow justify their terrorism?
I’ll probably make a separate post to discuss specific heraldry and symbols, because what medieval(ish) pedant could resist wrangling about that? But overall, it makes me both heartened and somewhat frustrated to see that more medievalists and classicists are taking a stand against the misappropriation of these symbols by violent white supremacists. Heartened, because the knowledge that these symbols do not mean anything like these Nazis want them to mean is getting louder and more visible; frustrated because the reason they feel entitled to use them in this way is because white supremacists and have tolerated, and even coddled, in academic spaces by far too many people in authority there.
It’s my hope that more and more people in these disciplines investigate what about their environment has encouraged this kind of vile element, and even drawn them towards these academic circles. I’ve already seen changes since I began liveblogging my research in May 2013; it’s my hope that despite the increasing backlash those who are working towards the betterment of our academic institutions will take even more initiative to make sure that white supremacists of any and every stripe will not feel welcome.
