As part of my project on etiological myths in tragedy, I have been forced to spend far too much time thinking about the deus ex machina and divine interventions in tragedy. I keep reading in comments on the deus ex machina that this is a feature of Typical Euripides. (This Typical Euripides guy also likes etiology apparently.) But as I’ve been going over much of this material I find again… Read more
…but there are some who surprise. Remembering that this data-mining thing is a sledgehammer and not a delicate chisel, among the findings in the first quick and dirty round of datamining tests for status in Greek tragedy is that the servant (therapon) in Euripides’ Heracleidae does not talk like other servants and non-elite individuals. Much legwork remains in following all the markers through to separate the meaningful from the meaningless,… Read more
Everyone is into data mining these days. Retailers find patterns in what you buy so that they can better market to you, governments search for patterns that identify terrorist threats, and data mining is at the core of privacy debates about the quarry of information collected by Facebook, Google and other websites. But the news isn’t all potentially nefarious or the subject of impending litigation. Data mining is simply a… Read more
