’A Sentiment Thermometer’ is one of the installations in the exhibition of Algoliterary Encounters. It will be the starting point for the workshop.

It asks questions to commonly used language models based on machine learning, like GloVe and word2vec. Using part of the Internet as training data, these models are considered to learn from ’collective intelligence’.

’A Sentiment Thermometer’ scores given written sentences as more positive or negative. This technique, also called sentiment analysis, is widely used to measure the success of marketing and other campaigns. The method is based on a script by software engineer Rob Speer, who shows the racist bias built into it, once the model starts judging culture specific sentences.

’A Sentiment Thermometer’ is presented as a case to raise questions of very different sorts. In this workshop members of Algolit will introduce the script and extend on the different steps and components that are used. Depending on the interests and skills, the script can be used to ask other questions to this algorithmically constructed unconsciousness. Or it can be modified in different ways, to offer better understanding and alternative points of view.

With: Manetta Berends, Cristina Cochior, Gijs De Heij, Hans Lammerant, An Mertens
Please register before 9-11 by sending a mail to an /// at /// constantvzw // dot /// org