iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 23/06/2026

I hope it's okay that I pulled this library in — it's much easier on the eyes than my off-the-cuff spectrum (live version: pletcher.github.io/ccc-2026-web...)

Screenshot of a heatmapped version of Sophocles' Electra, the Tutor's speech (ll. 680 ff.). The heatmap shows the averaged log likelihood of lemmata in epic (shades of red) vs. tragedy (shades of blue)

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 20/06/2026

For an upcoming conference presentation: a heatmapped version of Greek tragedy to show how "epic" or "tragic" each line is (by averaging log likelihoods of lemmata appearing in each genre)—the Tutor's speech in S. Electra is particularly exciting to see in context pletcher.github.io/ccc-2026-web...

A by-line heatmap of "epic"-tinged words (shades of red) versus "tragedy"-tinged words (shades of blue). The text is the Tutor's speech in Sophocles' Electra.

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 15/06/2026

Work in progress: quantifying work/register distinctiveness of lemmata in Homer. One interesting result: "god" [θεός] and "human" [ἄνθρωπος] are much more likely to appear in speech than in narrative. HT www.dices.uni-rostock.de (for speech references) and github.com/francescomam... (for treebanks)

Chart showing log-likelihood (x-axis) and relative frequency (y-axis) of differentiating lemmata in the Iliad and the Odyssey. While most lemmata cluster towards the center—indicating low affinity for either epic—key words like "Odysseus" and "Hektor" are both frequent and have a strong affinity for the Odyssey or the Iliad (respectively). Other strongly Odyssean words include "suitor," "guest/stranger," "great hall," "home," and "swineherd"; strongly Iliadic, "Achilles," "horse," "war," "battle (verb)," and "battle (noun)." (Calculations were performed on Greek lemmata, but I translate them here for readability.)

A chart showing the log-likelihood of speech versus narrative (x-axis) and relative frequency (y-axis) of lemmata in the Homeric epics. Words with strong narrative affinity (blue) include "proclaim," "speak," "go," "exchange," and "wingèd"; strong speech affinity, "evil," "guest/stranger," "know," "god," "human," and "home."

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 12/06/2026

So they asked Claude to find “evidence,” and the LLM — trained to please — did what it was made to do. 🤦‍♂️ The admission of confirmation bias is so brazen it’s almost impressive

We did a fair amount of research, including research using new artificial-intelligence methods to survey large bodies of text and see what was in them, and to identify themes and so on.

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 22/04/2026

Exactly — here’s the list of sources for the OCT Odyssey, which might itself be considered an edition of the original

First image of the OCT Odyssey recension

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 01/11/2025

Cleaned up the previous sentence embeddings comparisons—cleaner calculation of similarity for tragedies, and now both charts use the same scale (in autumn hues 🍂) It makes sense that tragedies overall are v. similar, but their similarities alone don't explain the lower-right messenger cluster

A heatmap showing tragedies' semantic similarity (cosine similarity of sentence embeddings) over time. Is there some kind of Euripides effect in the lower-center-right?

A heatmap showing messenger speeches' semantic similarity (cosine similarity of sentence embeddings) over time.

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 01/11/2025

I might need to update the original plot, but so far it's interesting to note that the messenger similarities don't seem to be a result of consolidation across tragedies, which remain quite distinct (at least from the perspective of sentence embeddings) #dh #ancmedsky

Heatmap showing each Attic tragedy's similarity to the others. There is a distinct dark diagonal of perfect similarity -- self-comparison -- but not much other highlighting, suggesting surprisingly differentiated semantics (on average)

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 31/10/2025

So sentence embeddings of messenger speeches in Attic tragedy show a modest but notable bump in semantic similarity toward the end of the 5th century (see attached image) — generic consolidation, maybe, but why? #ancmedsky #dh

Heatmap showing similarities between sentence embeddings in Attic tragedy. The diagonal is self-comparison

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 15/08/2025

“Ain’t no rule says a dog can’t play basketball” 🏀

A small white dog sitting in the grass in front of a basketball court

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 18/05/2025

Is this true? I.e., that museum curation started to abandon chronological framing “recently” (relative to the late 1990s)?

A page of text, with the quotation in question highlighted: “More recently, major exhibitions have tended to abandon the chronological framework in favour of groupings which cut across traditional distinctions, juxtaposing Poussin and Cézanne or pictures of the English Channel by both impressionists and traditionalists.” (Fowler 2002, 433)

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 09/03/2025

Brahm’s Requiem matinee — not a bad spot on a Sunday afternoon

Photo showing a music stand with an iPad that displays the first page of the trumpet part of Brahm’s Requiem. Orchestra members are visible behind the stand.

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 12/12/2024

Used this brilliant NER model on Pausanias recently: huggingface.co/UGARIT/flair... (thank you, @geophilologist.bsky.social !) Added links to a few by hand, and now we can render them for the next version of opecommentaries.org (Just excited to share — please pardon the styling 💅🏻) #dh

The opening passage of Pausanias' "Description of Greece" in Greek. Several words — place names — are highlighted, and the title text of one of them is shown as a link to a page about the underlying place.

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 07/11/2024

This is a big part of what I mean www.newyorker.com/magazine/dis...

A screen grab from the linked article with text highlighted: "For Trump voters, the economy was the top issue. The funny thing is the pretense that we can separate these concepts. Without the right to choose, women are not full participants in a democracy or an economy."

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 05/11/2024

STOP. THIS IS A CUTE ANIMAL CHECKPOINT. PLEASE SHARE A MINIMUM OF ONE (1) CUTE ANIMAL PIC BEFORE PROCEEDING. THIS IS A PRECAUTIONARY MEASURE TO PRESERVE THE MENTAL HEALTH OF THIS SITE. WE THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

A white dog with no eyes in a green sweater, curled up peacefully on a red blanket

A white dog with no eyes, belly bared — slightly NSFW — with a snaggle tooth indicating appreciation for the belly rubs coming from a blurry hand

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 13/06/2024

Alvin says hi (his octopus, Ike, could not be reached for comment)

A white dog with a pink nose being “hugged” by a plush yellow octopus

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 03/06/2024

Alvin is having some deep thoughts in the park

A white, foxy-looking dog with no eyes tilting his nose to take in a gentle breeze. Hems wearing red harness, sitting on a blanket with a sandal in the background. Deep background: a tree with lanterns that have just lit up in the twilight

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 24/05/2024

Parked Cybertruck. Uglier than I imagined. I thought these had all been recalled?

A Tesla Cybertruck parked on the street. It’s ugly and parked poorly

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 19/12/2023

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv... 🔥🔥 (so nice to read an article holding administrators' feet to the flames)

Screenshot of text from the linked article that reads, "The ugly truth is that the humanities work as beards for billion-dollar universities. We prattle on about anti-racism and justice and the politics of this and that, and the cumulative political effect of all that pseudo-radical chatter is scant to nil. A cynic could easily argue that the core purpose of the humanities has become to provide the illusion of progressivism to deeply unprogressive institutions, helping them appeal to wealthy liberal students. Colleges usher in social-justice-warrior faculty through the front door while exploiting workers, piling up student debt, and wooing mega-rich donors in the back. Humanities professors often think we’re critics of academic capitalism and rarely pause to wonder if we’re its unwitting stooges."

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 28/11/2023

Slightly better visualization? (Ismene only)

SVG of Ismene's weighted tf-idf scores by line compared to each other speaker in Sophocles' Antigone. She starts out speaking remarkably like her sister (which makes sense when you look at their conversation), but by the end she mostly resembles Creon's speech.

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 28/11/2023

Lobbing one over the #DH fence: I've been working on a tf-idf based analysis of the Sophoclean corpus. Some interesting (?) results so far: τάλας is highly characteristic of Antigone (the play and the character) Ismene's (bottom graph in this image) vocab sways with her "loyalty"

A visualization of word vectors comparing each character's speech in Sophocles' Antigone to the other characters. Lines indicate the degree to which the character is speaking with a vocabulary characteristic of the _other_ character labeled by the given line.

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 27/08/2023

It'd be hard to find a more condescending opening paragraph in a programming textbook. Stop coddling humanists like we've won some kind of consolation prize for people who couldn't hack it in STEM. From Anderson and Wicentowski. 2020. _XQuery for Humanists_. Texas A&M University Press.

A paragraph of text, with the following sentence highlighted, "Digital humanists aren't necessarily averse to math, but since they typically focus on texts, they often struggle to learn how to apply a programming language taught in that way to their work."

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Charles Pletcher @charlespletcher.org · 21/06/2023

Dall-E literally made my dreams come true: Aeschylus' Libation Bears:

The Tutor, Orestes, and Electra as bears

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