Article ID: CBB645588940

The Living Machine: A Computational Approach to the Nineteenth-Century Language of Technology (2023)

unapi

This article examines a long-standing question in the history of technology concerning the trope of the living machine. The authors do this by using a cutting-edge computational method, which they apply to large collections of digitized texts. In particular, they demonstrate the affordances of a neural language model for historical research. In a deliberate maneuver, the authors use a type of model, often portrayed as sentient today, to detect figures of speech in nineteenth-century texts that portrayed machines as self-acting, automatic, or alive. Their masked language model detects unusual or surprising turns of phrase, which could not be discovered using simple keyword search. The authors collect and close read such sentences to explore how figurative language produced a context that conceived humans and machines as interchangeable in complicated ways. They conclude that, used judiciously, language models have the potential to open up new avenues of historical research.

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Authors & Contributors
Aytes, Ayhan
Chemla, Karine Carole
Jones-Imhotep, Edward Charles
Kang, Minsoo
Koetsier, Teunis
Lenoir, Timothy
Journals
American Historical Review
British Journal for the History of Science
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
Technikgeschichte: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Technik und Industrie
Publishers
MIT Press
Oxford University Press
Harvard University Press
Kluwer Academic
Springer
The MIT Press
Concepts
Artificial intelligence
Human-machine interaction
Automata; robotics; cyborgs
Machines
Historical method
Historiography
People
Chambers, Robert
Homer
Kempelen, Wolfgang von
Time Periods
21st century
19th century
20th century, late
Modern
Early modern
18th century
Places
Europe
Asia
Greece
Japan
United States
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