This study examines the history of machine learning in the second half of the twentieth century. The disunified forms of machine learning from the 1950s until the 1990s expanded what constituted “legitimate” and “efficacious” descriptions of society and physical reality, by using computer learning to accommodate the variability of data and to spur creative and original insights. By the early 1950s researchers saw “machine learning” as a solution for handling practical classification tasks involving uncertainty and variability; a strategy for producing original, creative insights in both science and society; and a strategy for making decisions in new contexts and new situations when no causal explanation or model was available. Focusing heavily on image classification and recognition tasks, pattern recognition researchers, building on this earlier learning tradition from the mid-1950s to the late-1980s, equated the idea of “learning” in machine learning with a program’s capacity to identify what was “significant” and to redefine objectives given new data in “ill-defined” systems. Classification, for these researchers, encompassed individual pattern recognition problems, the process of scientific inquiry, and, ultimately, all subjective human experience: they viewed all these activities as specific instances of generalized statistical induction. In treating classification as generalized induction, these researchers viewed pattern recognition as a method for acting in the world when you do not understand it. Seeing subjectivity and sensitivity to “contexts” as a virtue, pattern recognition researchers distinguished themselves from the better-known artificial intelligence community by emphasizing values and assumptions they necessarily “smuggled in” to their learning programs. Rather than a bias to be removed, the explicit contextual subjectivity of machine learning, including its sensitivity to the idiosyncrasies of its training data, justified its use from the 1960s to the 1980s. Pattern recognition researchers shared a basic skepticism about the possibility of knowledge of universals apart from a specific context, a belief in the generative nature of individual examples to inductively revise beliefs and abductively formulate new ones, and a conviction that classifications are both arbitrary and more or less useful. They were, in a word, nominalists. These researchers sought methods to accommodate necessarily situated, limited, and perspectival views of the world. This extended to the task of classification itself, that, as one researcher formally proved, relied on value judgments that could not depend on logical or empirical grounds alone. “Inductive ambiguities” informed these researchers’ understanding of human subjectivity, and led them to explicitly link creativity and efficacious action to the range of an individual’s idiosyncrasies and subjective experiences, including one’s culture, language, education, ambitions, and, ultimately, values that informed science. Researchers justified using larger amounts of messy, error-prone data to smaller, curated, expensively-produced data sets by the potential greater range of useful, creative actions a program might learn. Such learning programs, researchers hoped, might usefully operate in circumstances or make decisions that even the program’s creator did not anticipate or even understand. This dissertation shows that the history of quantification in the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, including how we know different social groups, individual people, and ourselves, cannot be properly understood without a genealogy of machine learning. The values and methods for making decisions in the absence of a causal or logical description of the system or phenomenon emerged as a practical and epistemological response to problems of knowledge in pattern recognition. These problem-framing strategies in pattern recognition interwove creativity, learning, and computation in durable ways; they subsequently were relabeled “machine learning” from the late 1980s. Not progressive or linear or centralized, this development was disordered and contingent on the existence of disparate communities, each with distinct problems and techniques, while being equally engaged in exchanges of practices, values, and methods among themselves. Developing largely outside of symbolic artificial intelligence from the 1950s to 1980s, these diverse approaches came into AI as “machine learning” in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This reinvention of much of AI as machine learning was not because machine learning performed better, but was due to the realignment of values within AI—one where induction and large heterogeneous data sets seemed the better way to understand and to affect the world and the people in it.

No class has created more controversy than the middle class and nowhere has it produced more controversy than in Latin America. No class has been so poorly understood. No class has been so weakly analyzed in historical terms. Moreover, no class has had so many preconceptions and "myths" attached to it. I try to fill this historiographic gap by looking at the construction of empleado identities, as a part of the middle class, between the 1930s and the 1950s in Bogotá, Colombia. By using a diversity of primary sources - diaries, empleado handbooks, manuals, employment forms, historical statistics, government publications, personal archives, oral history and a set of novels - this thesis attempts to look at how empleado identities were "made" by means of the combination of the historical structures and the experiences lived at the very center of daily life. / Master of Arts

This study claims that formally experimental novels written in the early twentieth century place urgent, if often implicit, demands for acknowledgment upon their readers. Scholars have long held that the economic and cultural upheavals of the early twentieth century led novelists to doubt language’s referential capacities. But, even as signal modernist works by E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and others move away from a view of language as a means of gaining knowledge, they also underscore its capacity to grant acknowledgment; they treat words as tools for recognizing and responding to the inner lives of others. Stanley Cavell finds such a vision of language in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), a work Cavell describes as “modernist.” This dissertation demonstrates that Wittgenstein’s interest in acknowledgment emerges via his negotiation of the same historical forces with which literary modernism grapples: industrialization, World War, cross-cultural encounter. I argue that modernist representations of consciousness offer readers a way of hearing what Wittgenstein calls “the silent soliloquy of others,” giving us words by which we might adopt an attitude of acknowledgment toward the otherwise unvoiced inner lives of socially marginalized figures. Chapter One considers the crisis of reason that convulses early twentieth-century Britain and demonstrates how Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) critique excessive commitments to rationality as counterproductive to the acknowledgment of politically disenfranchised citizens. Chapter Two discusses Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929): three texts that, I show, cast traditional Victorian marriage as an unsatisfying form of intimacy and depict speakers hesitant to acknowledge their desires for alternative, same-sex modes of intimate relation. Chapter Three examines Faulkner’s portrayal of capitalist modernization in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), arguing that characters in these novels insist on the immitigable privacy of their experiences and struggle accordingly to gain acknowledgment from family members. Chapter Four reads Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) as two texts that represent the psychological experience of having one’s humanity go brutally unacknowledged under Jim Crow. / 2020-11-07T00:00:00Z

<p>This dissertation examines French and Francophone texts, contexts and thematic problems that comprise a genre I call "ethnographic fiction," whose development we can trace throughout the twentieth century in several geographic locations and in distinct historical moments. During the twentieth century in France, anthropology as an institutionalized discipline and "literature" (writ large) were in constant communication with one another. On the one hand, many French anthropologists produced stylized works demonstrating aesthetic sensibilities that were increasingly difficult to classify. On the other hand, though, poets, philosophers and other literary intellectuals read, absorbed, commented on and attacked texts from anthropology. This century-long conversation produced an interdisciplinary conceptual field allowing French anthropology to borrow from and adapt models from literature at the same time as literature asserted itself as more than just an artistic enterprise and, indeed, as one whose epistemological prerogative was to contribute to and enrich the understanding of humankind and its cultural processes. In this dissertation I argue that fiction can be seen to travel in multiple directions within France's twentieth-century conversation between literature and anthropology such that we can observe the formation of a new genre, one comprised of texts that either explicitly or more implicitly fuse fictional forms and contents together with the methodological and representational imperatives of anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork. Additionally, I argue that fiction moves geographically as well, notably from the metropole to Francophone West Africa which became an anthropological hotspot in the twentieth century once extended field research was legitimated in France and armchair anthropology was thoroughly discredited. By investigating ethnographies, novels, memoirs and films produced both in metropolitan France, Francophone West Africa, and the French Caribbean (including texts by Michel Leiris, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Jean Rouch, Jean-Claude Izzo and Raphaël Confiant), I aim to shed light on the kinds of work that elements of fiction perform in ethnographic texts and, by contrast, on how ethnographic concepts, strategies and fieldwork methods are implicitly or explicitly adopted and reformulated in more literarily oriented works of fiction. Ethnographic fiction as a genre, then, was born not only from the epistemological rapprochement of anthropology and literature in metropolitan France, but from complex and often fraught encounters with the very locations where anthropological praxis was carried out.</p> / Dissertation

The brothel has an important role in Latin American literature and film. The fictional brothel is expected to produce gender in both men and women, but these gendered identities are placed at the extremes within the bordello. This gender extremism creates opposition, or gender transgression, in the characters of twentieth-century Latin American narrative and film. Here I map the brothelized iteration of both genders through prohibitions, taboo, abjection, and violence within various texts and films. Much of the discipline of this cultural production of gender rests on the body. The body must bear the mark of its gender or the character risks violent consequences. Fatness plays an important role in this sexual economy, because fatness destroys gender, pushing the subject toward an androgyny that other characters reject or hate. Though the brothel has been studied before, it has not been analyzed from this gendered perspective. / text

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No description available.

Divorces in the United States during the twentieth century were, to say the least, extremely difficult to obtain. Most states had few grounds for divorce, and some, like New York, only allowed divorce in the instance of proven adultery. Waiting periods could stretch from one to three years. But for some hopeful divorcees, there was another way. Nevada had nine broad grounds for divorce, among them “mental cruelty.” After 1931, anyone could become a Nevada citizen and divorce within the state after a mere six weeks of residency. Before the widespread liberalization of divorce law in the early to mid-1970s, Reno, Nevada became the divorce capital of America. Divorcees, usually women, from all over the country poured into Reno to “get Reno-vated” and quickly part with their spouses. Subsequently, a complex local economy developed to accommodate the “six-weekers” during while they established residency. For the wealthy divorce-seeking elite, luxurious “divorce ranches” offered a relaxing six-week stay complete with catered meals, horseback riding, and trips to Lake Tahoe. The ranches brought together a substantial number of women who were overtly there for the same reason: to obtain a divorce. The simple fact of this mutual understanding provided a level of closeness and openness that was very unusual for the time, facilitating commiseration, camaraderie, and friendship. The closeness of ranch relationships was amplified by their demographics; the ranches were overwhelmingly female spaces, as the majority of their guests, proprietors, and staff were women. The Reno divorce industry demonstrates that women were willing to go to great lengths, measured in miles, days, and dollars, to obtain divorces. Affirming the existence of these Reno divorcees and examining their experiences during their quickie divorces illustrates substantial shifts in marital expectations throughout the twentieth century and contextualizes the 1970s expansion of divorce rights.

The concept of ‘middlebrow’ literature in the twentieth century, which received minimal critical attention from the Leavises onwards, has recently become a site of literary and sociological interest, especially regarding the interwar period. This thesis considers the ways in which a corporate middlebrow identity, amongst an intangible community of like-minded readers, was affected by a popularity of the fantastic in the 1920s and 1930s. This subgenre, which I term the ‘domestic fantastic’ (in which one or more elements of the fantastic intrude into an otherwise normalised domestic world) allowed middlebrow authors and readers to focalise and interrogate anxieties affecting the status of the home and its inhabitants which were otherwise either too taboo or, conversely, too well-worn for a traditional, non-fantastic examination. This fantastic vogue was largely initiated by the success of David Garnett’s metamorphosis novel Lady Into Fox (1922), which prepared the way for the other novels discussed in this thesis, predominantly Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew (1926), Ronald Fraser’s Flower Phantoms (1926), Edith Olivier’s The Love-Child (1927), John Collier’s His Monkey Wife (1930) and Green Thoughts (1932), and Frank Baker’s Miss Hargreaves (1940). Through the lenses of metamorphosis, creation, and witchcraft, these novels respond to and reformulate contemporary debates concerning sexuality in marriage, childlessness, and autonomous space for unmarried women. The ‘middlebrow fantasy’ of the stable, idealised home was being revealed as untenable, and the fantastic responded. During the interwar years, when assessments of British society were being widely recalibrated, the domestic fantastic was a subgenre which produced a select but significant range of novels which (whether playful or poignant, hopeful or tragic, nostalgic or progressive) provided the means for both author and reader to interrogate and comment upon the most pervading middle-class social anxieties, in unusual and revitalising ways.

In my dissertation, "Narrative Representations (of Time) in the 20th Century Novel" I examine the way in which depictions of time intersect with narrative representation in the modern and postmodern novel. I specifically focus on the use of parentheses as a way to capture differing types of chronology in narrative. The parenthesis, in a purely visual sense, physically disrupts the act of reading by creating a type of barrier around one text, separating it from the main narrative. I argue that it is with this disruption that 20th century authors were able to experiment with depictions of time and the disruption of linear narrative. Borrowing Gerard Genette's phrase "temporal ellipses" I examine how authors in the 20th century used the "temporal parentheses" in order to convey different temporal experiences in narrative. For Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, the parenthesis works as a way of presenting simultaneity of experiences when spatially separated. For William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, the parenthesis creates a kind of compressed time, so that the past becomes a heavy burden upon the present, as represented by the way a narrative experience can be extended within parentheses. In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children the parenthesis is used to bridge and create a dialogue between the present moment of the telling and the past moment of the story. In Toni Morrison's Sula, the parenthesis calls attention to physical placement, representing the way in which personal identity is linked to physical place and the rejection of permanence in the novel.