Conversation with Sam Tanenhaus about computing literary jargon for the weekly New York Times Book Review podcast. (July 29, 2011)
On this week’s podcast, Helen Schulman discusses “This Beautiful Life.” Also on the program, the linguist Ben Zimmer explains how computers reveal the jargon of fiction.
(Artsbeat post, audio)
New York Times Artsbeat blog, “Exposing Literary Style, One Word at a Time” (July 29, 2011)
In this week’s Mechanic Muse column for the Book Review, I look at how vast new databases and techniques can help scholars of the digital humanities zero in on the nitty-gritty of literary style, right down to the level of individual words. An exciting development over the past few years is that many of the tools that scholars use to plumb the depths of literary usage are now publicly available online. These resources aren’t locked up in an ivory tower, accessible only to an elite band of researchers. Call it the democratization of digital scholarship.
Read the rest here.
Interview on “The Conversation with Ross Reynolds” (KUOW Seattle) about the use and misuse of words. (July 21, 2011)
Language experts say “literally” is our most misused word. Literally. But if everyone is doing it, does that make it right? We take your phone calls with language expert Ben Zimmer.
Show page, RealAudio, mp3, download
Christopher Muther, “Literally the Most Misused Word” (Boston Globe, July 19, 2011)
Garner now puts “literally’’ at stage three, which is defined as “being used by a majority of the language community.’’ However, Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, believes “literally’’ has already slipped dangerously close to stage four, which means that it has become ubiquitous and only a few diehards reject the new meaning.
Zimmer has a simple solution: Rephrase your sentence.
Read the rest here.