Exercises

• Take the following text, and mark it on our class Prism (The Prism has a longer excerpt, not just what you see below):

  Anita Sarkeesian doesn’t give me the address of her San Francisco apartment over email. Instead, she texts it to me a few hours before we’re set to meet. After thousands of rape and death threats, a bomb scare and an email promising a mass shooting at one of her speaking events, a woman can’t be too careful. For some male gaming aficionados, the most frightening enemy isn’t an animated foe but this 31-year-old feminist with a penchant for hoop earrings, sitting across from me. They’ve called Sarkeesian a con artist, and raised thousands of dollars to film an exposé-style documentary about her (which exposes nothing). Some even created a game in which users can punch an image of her face until it is bloodied.

• Now take the same text and process it on the live demo for Stanford’s sentiment analysis software. (Note how each sentence is its own tree. The demo color codes individual words as very negative, negative, neutral, positive or very positive).

• What are the differences between how the emotions are marked in the Prism versus how they are marked in Stanford’s tool?

• What does all this say about what humans are better at? Computers?