Response 4

Dear Grandpa,

You had always regarded reading as a sacred practice, not tolerating anything that would sacrilegiously corrupt its essence. Every morning, you would make your cup of coffee and sit by the porch, reading a newspaper or a book. But you also were, unlike a lot of people from your generation, always welcoming of the advancements of the modern age. This is why I know you would have enjoyed me sharing about what I learned in this class – at the very least, I know you would’ve been intrigued.

This class is called “Reading Like A Computer” and for a semester, this is exactly what we did: attempted to read “from a distance”. I could make the claim that I have read so many books this semester without reading a single full page in the same way people read books. You see, when you sit down to read a book, you are paying close attention to every word written and, most probably, reading it sequentially. But in this class, we learned that reading can involve varying degrees of distance and modes. Speed, surface, and distant reading are a few of those forms. Now, I know you would have stopped here, and we would have argued about the legitimacy of calling reading in those forms “reading”, but I would have urged you to hang in there and let me explain.

Essentially, what we did in this class is that we digitized reading materials and read them at a distance. We used softwares that will “read” the text, chopping it up into words. After that we performed a whole bunch of operations to attempt to “comprehend” the text: find out the most occurring words, which words repeatedly exist in clusters around other words, how close is one body of text to another body of text, etc. As the semester went by, our techniques became more nuanced. We experimented with gauging the overall emotion of a text by using various ways of weighing the sentiment of each chopped up part of the text and produced pretty graphs. To get a bird’s eye view, we also experimented with a technique called topic modeling that tried to predict the general themes addressed in the text. I know you wanted to read volumes of books at a time but were unable to, and although this is not what reading to you has meant, I know you would have loved to give it a shot.

I know what you would be thinking – what if you wanted to read text handwritten by other people? Well, there’s a way to digitize that too. We used this technology called Optical Character Recognition that will try to recognize letters and words and produce text that can be read by a computer. I would have liked to tell you that it can read yours too, but even I could not...

Ready for grading!

Date: 16th December 2021