"Topic Modeling: What Humanists Actually Do With It." A Guest Post by Teddy Roland, University of California, Berkeley
One of the hardest questions we can pose to a computer is asking what a human-language text is about. Given an article, what are its keywords or subjects? What are some other texts on the same subjects? For us as human readers, these kinds of tasks may seem inseparable from the very act of reading: we direct our attention over a sequence of words in order to connect them to one another syntactically and interpret their semantic meanings. Reading a text, for us, is a process of unfolding its subject matter.
