Shitpost February: eigenvectors

If I do two of these, does that make it more awkwardly apparent that I'm not actually doing it, or less? Really, I don't think I am ever going to make Dreamwidth my casually-post-stuff place, though I will probably keep trying for the next several years to make it a place I live.

Anyway, I picked the prompt "eigenvectors" because I've actually co-authored research that prominently uses eigenvector centrality, but then I realised that I can't explain what an eigenvector is because I don't really know.

Instead here is some interesting research (in blog form!) from someone who is willing to explain eigenvectors, and even apply them to eighteenth century literature.

Whenever I hear people in the digital humanities beginning to murmur about the hot new thing, word vectors, though, I almost feel despair at how little anybody talks to anybody else -- my mother did her dissertation on word vectors. This is a longstanding field! But that's in computer science, and nobody in literature wants to read a computer science paper.

This post brought to you by: My Career Strategy Of Reading Computer Science Papers Sometimes, To Incredible Acclaim

[inspiration from Shitpost February]