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PRODID:-//Virginia Tech//VT Calendar//EN
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DTSTAMP:20151023T160000Z
UID:1443119264539@events.msu.edu
CATEGORIES:Conferences / Seminars / Lectures
DTSTART:20151023T160000Z
DTEND:20151023T180000Z
SUMMARY:Darwin's Semantic Voyage: Exploration and Exploitation of Victorian Science in the Reading Notebooks
DESCRIPTION:
 Speaker: Colin Allen, Provost Professor, Department 
 of History and Philosophy of Science, University 
 of Indiana Bloomington\n
  \n
 During the 
 23 years between his voyage on the Beagle 
 and publication of The Origin of Species, Charles 
 Darwin meticulously documented the books 
 he read. His Reading Notebooks thus enable the 
 study of inputs to his creative process between 
 1837 and 1860.  We located digitized full 
 texts of 670 of his nonfiction readings (390 
 of which he classified as work-related reading) 
 and applied topic modeling to them. We 
 then used the semantic space of the topic models 
 in a novel way to measure the distances that 
 Darwin traveled between books.  These measurements 
 permitted us to investigate the trade-off 
 he made between reading within a given 
 domain and switching to new domains. Our analysis 
 shows that Darwin's behavior shifts from 
 exploitation to exploration on multiple timescales, 
 and that at the longest timescale these 
 shifts correlate with major intellectual 
 epochs of his career. Furthermore, contrasting 
 his reading order with the publication order 
 of the same texts, we find Darwin's consumption 
 of the texts is more exploratory than the 
 culture's production of them.\n
  \n
 For more 
 information, please contact Thomas Padilla at 
 tpadilla@msu.edu.\n\n
 Price: free\n
 Sponsor: Administration\n
 Sponsor's Homepage: http://www.lib.msu.edu\n
 Contact name: Thomas Padilla\n
 Contact phone: 517-353-8700\n
 Contact email: tpadilla@msu.edu\n
LOCATION:Main Library, Green Room (W444)
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