I command you to rise from your grave

Dag, yo. I didn’t realize I’d let this thing sit for so long. My apologies, if you’re still checking intermittently. It’s been an eventful few months. In some of the biggest news, I finally passed my MPhil-to-PhD upgrade process. (I always spell it “upgrayedd” in my head. The extra D is for a double dose of my pimping.)

In practical terms, that means that for now I can take a break from writing the same two goddamned chapters over and over again and get some actual work done. It’s been tremendously liberating, and I’ve managed to get a lot of learning done on the kinds of techniques I need for the next milestone in my thesis. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but I’m actually taking some statistical clustering that’s most often used in life sciences for things like gene sequencing and using it to analyze text. Neat, no? I’ve finally got some code written, even. I’m actually having a little bit of fun with it for a change.

Oh, I’ll still have to go back and rewrite a mound of stuff–don’t get me wrong–but it won’t be quite as bad. It’s a lot easier to write about where you’re going to go once you’ve already been there. It’ll be a lot easier now that I have a new laptop, too; the old one, in the charming phrase Katrin’s family uses, “went to go live with Jesus” a few weeks ago, and I had to replace the whole thing because the cost and time involved in replacing the defunct motherboard made it the only logical choice. Fortunately, the hard drive was still intact and I back up all my thesis stuff to Dropbox, so I was able to get everything restored without too huge a delay. The new machine isn’t as powerful as the old one, and won’t play newer games, but I suppose that’s for the best.

In other news, May was a very marriage-related month. Katrin and I had our fifteenth–Fifteenth!–anniversary. It was kind of low-key, but still a really nice night. We had dinner at the Savoy Grill, then saw the West End production of Sweeney Todd, which was amazing. Only a couple of weeks later, we went up to Edinburgh for the wedding of two friends we’ve known since the Exeter days. It was our first time in Scotland, and we can’t wait to see it again some time. The city is beautiful, and the countryside isn’t half bad either.

I’ve managed to get myself into a production of Henry V with a local company that performs near Waterloo Station. I’m playing the Archbishop of Canterbury and the King of France. It’s a pretty neat production, and the people are all great. I’ve enjoyed getting out of the house and interacting with people.

Finally, Katrin and I are traveling to America for a couple of weeks next month. It’ll be my first time back since I left almost five years ago, but I’m not really looking forward to the trip. Oh, I’ll enjoy seeing family and friends and familiar places and all, but I’m dreading getting to the airport, then getting through security, then the eight-hour-plus flight, then the jet lag…and then repeating the entire process in the other direction. (This is to say nothing of the reverse culture shock. After all this time, I think the sight of an American city with all its free space and huge roads might actually kill me.)

Stay tuned. If transatlantic travel and jet lag don’t kill me, I’ll keep you updated.

I just hope no one pronounces anathema on me.

(Only a month this time. I’m getting better about this whole updating thing.)

The new studio space turned out to be a good idea. After being asked to produce a revised completion schedule for my thesis, I managed to crank it out within the week. It’s gotten to the point where I feel guilty if I don’t go to the studio every weekday and spend at least a couple of hours getting some work done. The other thing that’s looking up is my supervisor is being a lot more hands-on. I have concrete deadlines now, and he’s actually chasing me up for writing that’s due. I think it’ll be a tremendous help to me and let me get my work done on time. If nothing else, I’m actually feeling productive now instead of like an academic poseur.

Speaking of academia, the more I get into my particular niche subject and the more material I read from prominent people in the field, the more I realize that I’ve stuck myself into the middle of a slow-moving and long-term…well, religious war actually comes closest to describing it. The problem comes when trying to describe the whole thing. It’s like trying to explain the Arian heresy to someone who’s not steeped in fourth-century Catholic Church history. It’s that abstruse…but I’ll give it a shot.

Okay, in a nutshell ^[1], people in my field (stylometry or computational stylistics, depending on who you’re talking to) try to figure out who might have written anonymous or disputed texts by computer-based manipulation of data derived from features in the texts. These features include things like words used more frequently by one author than another, or the relative distribution of grammatical features (for instance, how often the preposition “to” is followed by the determiner “a”), and so on. It’s far from an exact science yet, though, and most of the work still revolves around trying to figure out what method or methods will best tell you who might have written a given text.

All of this brings us to my little corner of the field, which is Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. There are two main stylometric camps in my corner at the moment: the Statisticians and the Collocationists. (Not their actual names; it’s just what I’m calling them for purposes of this post.) The Statisticians run some pretty heavy statistical analysis against isolated grammatical features like the occurrence of individual function words (“closed-class” words like pronouns, prepositions, etc.). The idea is that these features are relatively independent of conscious thought, unlike the choice of “open-class” words like nouns and verbs, and will constitute an authorial “fingerprint” that will hold true across an author’s works and distinguish him or her from others.

The Collocationists, conversely, tend to depend on n-grams, which are sequences of words that reoccur in various lengths. (Two words is a bigram, three is a trigram, and so on.) They perform their own calculations on the occurrences of these sequences in the hopes that the relative distribution of them in an author’s works will form an authorial fingerprint of its own. 

(I tend to side with the Statisticians, largely because n-grams very frequently include open-class words that could be included in conscious imitation of or borrowing from other authors, which would muddy the stylistic indicators. Also, my own work concerns the grammatical structure of sentences themselves, which–while still consciously chosen to a degree–will be less influenced by this kind of borrowing than n-grams can be.)

Usually the arguments between the two are pretty genteel, academic affairs, with all the venom of a particularly boring game of bridge. Lately, though, it’s gotten a bit more vicious, with an especially scathing column published this year by a Collocationist that was ostensibly a review of a book by a pair of Statisticians, but turned out to be more of a thirty-page “This is why I’m right and they’re wrong” philippic. Reactions ranged from shock to…more shock. It’s a fairly slow-moving field, though, so any really strong reactions to it have yet to see any print that I’ve noticed.

The more astute among you may have noticed that I’m not naming names. There are several very good reasons for that:

1. It’s a tiny, tiny field. There are maybe about forty of us in the world. 
2. Of those, quite a few live near me.
3. I personally know–at least via email, if not in person–most of them. 
4. They’re all fairly technically proficient, and they’ll find themselves on Google pretty quickly.
5. The guy who wrote the thirty-page thing? He also wrote the book that got me into this whole field, and I see him socially in and around London. Awkward.

If I’m not careful, I just might find myself excommunicated by the Stylometry Pope and have to live my life as a heretic…or worse, an Oxfordian. Pray to Shakespeare Jesus for me and my metaphors.

^[1] Counting yourself a king of infinite space optional.^[2]

^[2] God, I’m over-educated.

Thought you were done? Surprise!

Another months-long hiatus. Apologies, but neither of us has felt much like posting for a good long while. For my part, it’s mostly because I’ve had another PhD setback–I finally got all my materials ready for the upgrade process and sent them off to my supervisor, who assured me everything was ready.

A week later, he requested an urgent meeting with me to tell me the upgrade committee said that I wasn’t ready and my writing was too thin (for one thing, there are sources I apparently neglected to cite), and I should try again in four to five months after massive revisions. (Which really raises the question of why my supervisor said I was ready, but I’ve already vented enough bile about that.)

So here I am in the position of still having to work on stuff I’ve been slaving away over for months and months, thinking I was done, only to have to pull a lot of it out and rework it completely. It’s pretty goddamned discouraging, you know? The one thing that’s keeping me sane is that those of my friends who’ve done PhDs assure me this gut-wrenching emotional treadmill is all part of the process, and it does eventually get better.

In what’s partly a burst of work ethic and partly desperation, Katrin and I have rented a small studio space two blocks from our house in order for me to have a place I can go and get some work done that’s not the couch, because let’s not kid ourselves here–almost nothing gets done when I’m working on the couch. We can move in as of the first of November. The theory is that I’ll have some structure to my day without having to schlep an hour across town every day to the British Library or King’s College’s library. (It’s exhausting enough doing it once a week or so, believe me.) All the rest of the studios seem to be occupied by bands, clothing designers, and various types of artists, and I’m secretly kind of looking forward to being the oddball academic in the place.

In related news, I’ve been preparing for the actual coding-based work of the PhD by teaching myself Python. I was skeptical at first, because I'd been working in Java and C# for so long, but once I actually got into it, I couldn't stop. It's absolutely amazing how much Python just…gets out of your way and lets you do the work you’re trying to do. The syntax is ridiculously simple, and if you need to do something but can’t quite remember how, more often than not, if you make a guess at the command, you’ll be right. I don’t think I can ever go back to another language.

On a tangentially-related note, I had another birthday last week, and Katrin and I went on a day trip to Bletchley Park. It was pretty amazing–we saw some original Enigma machines and reconstructed codebreaking machines like the Colossus and bombe. It was very much a Triumph of the Nerds kind of day, although I’ve had to guard against my natural tendency to get really fascinated by a new thing and get sidetracked from my PhD work.

In other words, I really, really don’t need to occupy myself with building a bombe simulator in Python. I need to keep telling myself that. Mild but memorable self-inflicted electric shocks may be required to reinforce the lesson. I’ll keep you posted.

Yay, I’m an academic! And old!

Has it really been almost six months? I’d feel worse about it if I knew that anyone was still reading this. (Hint hint.) It’s been pretty eventful. I turned (ohmyGod) forty in October, and my parents and sister visited for my birthday. I got to show them around as many of the sights as I could before Mom’s arthritis kept her from moving around too much more, including giving them the whole London commuter experience on Southeastern Rail into our neighborhood. (Spoiler: I don’t think they cared for it very much.)

On the down side, I overestimated my work ethic as far as my PhD work, got very little work done, and had a disastrous meeting with my supervisor back in January. As it turns out, the “safety” deadline I’d been working against in the back of my head was supposedly only for part-time students, and my whole upgrade package (some 15,000 words) was due then. I drank very, very heavily that night.

Fortunately, it looks like I’ve gotten a legitimate extension, and I should be able to make the revised deadline which is coincidentally more or less the old deadline I was working with. Huzzah, and all that. As a sort-of bonus, the pressure and raving, gibbering fear generated by realizing I was so far behind got me to pump out the rest of the chapter I’ve been working on for what seems like forever. I’m done with my literature review (7,300 words or so) and ready to work on the other chapter I need for the upgrade from MPhil to PhD student status. Wish me luck.

Once I’m done with the upgrade, I’ve got one more chapter due by June, and it’s the one where the real theoretical stuff starts up and I start actually classifying sentence types. I hope I’ll have fun with it and not go too crazy.

In other news, I’ve been doing some basic data manipulation and stylometric work for a couple of the people involved in the John Ford Project for a couple of months now. It’s been kind of fun, if a little frustrating in spots (could Microsoft Access be any more obtuse?), and it’s not a bad way to get my foot in the door and get some concrete experience on my CV. Keep your fingers crossed; it may lead to an eventual non-tech support job.

Snow, death and where did November go?

I’m the one who’s jetlagged and Tom’s the one sleeping in the afternoon. Just returned yesterday from two weeks in Minnesota visiting my family. It was the first time I’d been back to the US since moving here—three years to the day, in fact. My mom bought my ticket, and I was there for a couple of family birthdays and Thanksgiving. (Haha, I am here to ruin your Thanksgiving! Deal with it! —I kid, I kid; it was a fun and low-stress holiday.)

I brought all of the Xmas presents that I couldn’t afford to ship last year, ensuring I was a favorite with the kids. I met my niece Maggie for the first time; she’s 2½ and speaks in complete sentences, something I always appreciate in a child. I actually allowed myself to be suckered into knitting something for her (largely for the challenge of designing a pair of leggings, but also knowing she’ll look adorable in them).

Other highlights included having family portraits taken, visits with both grandmas (one is convinced she’ll never see me again, which I steadfastly deny; the other may or may not recognize me), attending Dr Sketchy’s with my mom, introducing my parents to Mad Men (and explaining that you’re supposed to be uncomfortable at being reminded that the early 60s were really like that. The story is about how things start to change from there) and having a ton of clothes bought for me. Even having brought next to nothing with me and leaving the presents behind, I still had to return with an extra suitcase. Much as I profess to be about fashion minimalism, I have to admit this stuff was needed. It may have to last me at least another 3 years.

While there I also got the shocking news that an old friend of mine died on Thanksgiving day. He wasn’t much older than I. I’d reconnected with him on Facebook within the last year or so and knew he’d had health problems, but I was unaware of how ill he was. There was a party in his honor in my home town, but I couldn’t make the 6-hour drive as I had to fly out the next morning.

This comes on the heels of the death in October of another old friend, also close to my age. I’d been out of touch with her for a while and her illness was much longer and lingering, but it’s still jarring to know that she no longer exists. Both of them suffered from lifelong diabetes and consequent kidney failure. It was other causes that eventually killed each, but that weakened state undoubtedly contributed. My dad’s also just been diagnosed borderline diabetic and reminded me that it runs on both sides of the family. Note to self: Lay off the gummi bears.

And yesterday after I got home, I got email from my parents that my great-aunt died at age 95. A respectably long life and she’d been in hospice for a while, I guess, but she was my grandma’s favorite sister. I was just talking with Grandma the other day about how close they’d always been, and it makes me worry about her now.

My trip home was nice if lengthy; I had a long layover in Toronto and got to spend a few hours with my friend Doug, talking creative stuff over coffee and dinner. I hope I can keep motivated to follow through with the plans we discussed—we’ve been batting this project idea around for years, and it’s just up to me to get going on the thing. I must say that if and when I ever get around to holding up my end of the work, it’s gonna be brilliant.

I arrived home in London to a snow-covered landscape whose sole positive attribute was to provide me with a seamless transition from Minneapolis. Southeastern Railways have again been rendered inoperable, and the trip home from the airport took several hours via various other modes of transit. Apparently I’m luckier than a lot of people in this end of town who couldn’t make it home from work. I’m back and safe and warm with Tom and the kitties, and counting my blessings. I’m thankful for a lot.

Hacking away at a rich seam of stylometry…

Phew. Been a while, but it’s been eventful. Stella’s settled in nicely, and will occasionally sleep snuggled up with the boys. She’s still small, but getting bigger and bigger, and has the loudest purr I’ve ever heard from a cat her size.

In other news, I’m finally, finally making progress on my PhD. I’ve got a concrete goal–15,000 to 20,000 words by February, including an annotated tentative table of contents, a literature review, and a sample chapter–and it looks manageable in the time I have. I’ve been looking up papers and books and things, and so far I’m on track to get this thing done by the first part of the year and then start working on the fun stuff like the grammatical tagging and sentence classification.

On a related note, I’m starting to make contacts with other people in my little academic niche, and I’m going to two seminars in the next two months being given by people who wrote pretty seminal works in the field. Life is good, intellectually speaking, anyway.

I might just be able to get my PhD and become an academic after all. It’s looking more and more possible.

Wednesday catventure

The doorbell rang at around 8 this morning, waking me up. We have a novelty doorbell that plays a rotation of a dozen or so songs. It’s the most annoying thing, and we can’t disable or replace it. This morning’s tune was “Row Row Row Your Boat” (other selections include “Happy Birthday”, “London Bridge” and “Clementine”), and I noticed it seemed to be playing more slowly than usual. Could the battery be dying? Is it possible that soon we’ll be able to put an “out of order” sign by the button and blissfully just ask people to knock?

It was a delivery of cat food and litter from Pet Planet, which I’d been expecting (be prepared—wear the tank top with the built-in bra!). I signed for it without opening my eyes, dragged the box in and was about to shuffle back to bed when I became aware of a distinct lack of cats. No cats on the bed or under it. No cats in the living room. No cats in the bathroom. I walked into the kitchen just in time to see Noodles slinking  back in through the window. Our kitchen window has a latch that prevents it from opening more than an inch or two, and somehow it got unlatched. Now I’m paranoid that the cats have learned how to do this. It took us a couple of weeks to figure it out.

I panicked a bit and threw on my glasses, dress and shoes. Stella’s never been outside here before. I don’t think she’d make a run for it, but what if she doesn’t know better? Is our address info current on her chip yet? Is she lost in the big wide world? …I found her marching back and forth on the windowsill, chirping away and a little confused about not being able to go in through the now-closed window.

So that left Alfie. Sure enough he’d managed to climb over the fence and onto the neighbors’ patio, as he’d done once before, and he looked just as bewildered as he had the first time he ended up over there. I coaxed him onto their table and finally retrieved him with a careful combination of balancing on my tiptoes on the fence, letting him climb toward me and grabbing him by the scruff of the neck. I can’t have been comfortable for him—you really shouldn’t lift a grown cat by their skin that way, and he’s a huge kitty—but he seems none the worse for wear, and they’re all back in and safe now. With plenty of food and fresh litter.

I’m pretty sure Noodles was the mastermind of today’s adventure. He’s still the undercat, but he’s also our resident little escape artist. Stella’s started copying things he does. He’d better not be teaching her this.

In other stuff…I had a birthday this week. I’m now halfway between Grownup and Old. If I dwell too much on this fact it will only depress me, and there’s nothing I can do about it anyway. It was a pretty low-key, decent birthday. We went to see my friend Dusty Limits in a little indie opera production. We arrived late and missed the first of the three vignettes, but Dusty’s was the second. We were suitably impressed. I turn into more of a dorky fangirl every time I see him.

The third performance was an interpretation of “The Raven”, and we’d looked forward to seeing what they’d do with it. I’ll just say…the set and costume design was gorgeous. And the performers did an excellent job of keeping a high level of energy and focus through the whole thing. As far as the actual content of the piece, I’ll allow Tom to rant about that if he wants. He’s much better at it than I am.

Here now is a picture of some cats.

New kitty!

I’m trying to be a little more coherent than “NEW KITTY NEW KITTY YAY!” here, but it’s kind of hard. The home visit from the Mayhew volunteer went well, and as of yesterday we’re back up to a three-cat household again. (I was going to post pictures, but I can’t find the camera cable. More later when I dig it up.)

Her original name was Dice, but Katrin and I didn’t much care for that. On the train ride home–during which the poor kitty got nervous and had a little accident in her carrier–I just spontaneously called her “Stellaluna” because she looked like a cute little bat. She’s now Stella for short, and it seems to fit.

Introducing her to the boys seems to have gone well, with a minimum of hissing and growling so far. They’ve even started cautiously sniffing at each other and being startled when their noses inevitably bump. It’s adorable. They haven’t started all sleeping in a pile yet, but it’s only the second day.

Apart from the scars on my arm from yesterday’s bath (cleaning her up from the carrier, which she did not enjoy), the only down side is having to go through iterations of this:

“Ham! Want!”

“No, kitty. This is my ham sandwich. It’s my lunch. You have your own food.”

“Ham!”

“No, kitty! Go play with some string or something.”

(She vanishes, then slinks around me and reappears on my other side.)

“O HAI! I am a completely different cat, and couldn’t help noticing you have ham! Want!”

“Damn it, kitty…”

Overall, it’s great having her around, though. She’s tiny and purry and beautiful, and I hope she and the boys will get to be good friends.

Heed well my verbs and pronouns!

I’ve got a new article up over at Mad Shakespeare. It’s a small travel guide to the Rose Theatre in Southwark. Go! Read! Enjoy, even if I used the word “replete”!

In other news, we finally (after two weeks) got our boiler fixed, and we can now take hot showers again, and none too soon. (I was beginning to find new definitions of the word “itchy” as the not-fully-rinsed-off soap accumulated. Blech.) I’d still like someone to fix it so we don’t have to turn up the thermostat to shower, but at this point, I’m not going to be all that picky.

In other other news, even though we really shouldn’t be spending the money right now, we paid the adoption fee for a little all-black cat from the Mayhew Animal Home (about whom I can’t say enough nice stuff–seriously, best animal shelter I’ve ever encountered). Here’s a picture:

That's her on the right.

She was the friendliest little thing, and had a tiny, almost inaudible purr that didn’t stop the entire time we were there. We just have to have a home visit from one of the Mayhew’s volunteers to make sure that we’re good cat people, and then we’ll be a three-cat household again. Things may finally be looking up a bit. Keep your fingers crossed.

Doo wop wop wop trashion

Those look dangerous. Especially if you left them on the floor and stepped on them in the dark.

Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be making myself a pair of bunny ears either. If I was too late to get on the kitty ears bandwagon, bunny ears are pretty much out of the question.

I could cut the crotch out of a pair of  tights and make them into a shirt, though.

Or you could just cut the crotch out of your tights.

Who says I haven’t? …Okay, I haven’t. Oh, here you go—you’ve already got some jeans with an inappropriate tear.

I may be doing this first chance I get, though. Seriously, I love me some trashion.