Boccelli

Photo by Ross Sokolovski on UnsplashA quick experiment at the intersection of Art and ScienceIn this article, I describe a quick experiment that aims to quantify the associations among two seemingly orthogonal sets — basic shapes and primary colors—by using word embedding representations and cosine similarity to test Wassily Kandinsky’s theory of form and color. However, while the use of cosine similarity to measure associations among words is broadly accepted in the natural language processing literature, and while the…

Photo by Peter Olexa on UnsplashReadings in computational social scienceThis article comments on three papers associated with computational social science research: (1) Do Cascades Recur? (Cheng et al., 2016); (2) Integrating Text and Image: Determining Multimodal Document Intent in Instagram Posts (Kruk et al., 2019); and (3) Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures (Breiman, 2001); these papers focus on (1) recurrence in content sharing on social media (here, Facebook); (2) the use of multimodal data (image–caption pairs)…