Here's a new toy I'm recommending to all my friends: the Gender Genie. It's an algorithm that analyzes frequency of certain words to predict whether the author is male or female. I don't know anything about team sports or cars, although I do know a fair amount about the British navy during the Napoleonic wars, so I was curious to see how I would rate.
My first attempt confirmed what I've always believed--I am a man (barely). The algorithm analyzed my recent post about the movie Nostalghia and concluded that I used 861 words associated female writing and 1005 words associated with male writing. My interest piqued, I decided to see if I could duplicate the result by submitting my less recent post about the beauties of Charlottesville, and was amused to discover that I was now female by a score of 757 to 549. Darn poetic descriptions--that might explain why I was generally the only male in my English graduate classes. Finally, I pasted both posts into the Genie along with all the text from my recent Lucy's Corner post and was pleased to find that fatherhood brings up my manly averages--I am once again male, albeit by the exceedingly slim margin of 1971 to 1976. Did I quit while I was ahead? You bet.
Personally, I think algorithms being used to predict or confirm authorship are pretty darn cool, especially those that have been used to analyze ancient scripture. The Gender Genie is, by admission, a simplified version of one such algorithm, but if nothing else it's a good conversation starter. My own experience with the Genie seems to indicate that film criticism and philosophic navel-gazing are both the realms of men, poetic imagery turns you into a sissy (childhood bullies finally vindicated), and fatherhood is the manliest profession of all. Excuse me while I go read Annie Dillard to my two-year-old.
PS-I got the Gender Genie link from this blog, by the founder of Charity Navigator. Both are worth looking at if you have charitable impulses but don't want your donations to be embezzeled or outright wasted.
4 comments:
Well. Law school makes you write like a man. The gender genie seems confused by my writing style!
I came across this thing a couple years ago and plugged the short story I was writing at the time into it. It correctly identified manliness, so it's accurate as far as I can tell.
I think certain academic fields (law, literary studies, etc.) must encourage a tendency towards masculinity. My blog was (correctly) identified as having a female author, but when I plugged in a two page description of my dissertation, it came out as resoundingly male!
I pasted in a journal entry I wrote about Raymond Chandler. Apparently hard-boiled detective stories are male (544 to 162). Who knew?
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