We All Write Like White Men
Jul. 13th, 2010 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
teaberryblueSo, I’d been eyeing that meme going around since yesterday…
You know the one, the one where you plug in something you’ve written, and it tells you who you write like?
But I was starting to notice an uncomfortable pattern, so I decided to plug in some famous authors.
I started with people whom I knew were actually represented in the meme generator:
Hemingway
Margaret Atwood
Chuck Palahniuk
PG WodeHouse
Raymond Chandler
JK Rowling
Douglas Adams
Then I progressed to people who I thought were probable entrants in it.
William Shakespeare
Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
Geoffrey Chaucer
I write like
James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
Bill Burroughs
Franz Kafka
Mark Twain
I write like
James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
Thomas Jefferson
Ralph Ellison
Virginia Woolf
I hope at this point, you can see where I'm going with this. I started putting in the names of famous female writers, both white female writers and women of color, and posted up the results here. It's completely unscientific and unordered, people are listed in the order they popped into my head to try.
Toni Morrison
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
Sappho
Dorothy Parker
bell hooks
Isabel Allende
Zora Neale Hurston
Alice Walker
Sandra Cisneros
Maxine Hong Kingston
Octavia Butler
Ursula K Leguin
Willa Cather
Madeleine L'Engle
Shahrnush Parsipur
Phyllis Wheatley
I write like
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
Shirley Jackson
Sylvia Plath
Arundhati Roy
E Nesbit
Lucy Maud Montgomery
ETA for those of you coming from Roger Ebert's Twitter, there are two follow-up posts:
Rhetorically Constructed
My Father Writes Like Me
I recommend you read before commenting because they have additional information. Thanks!
I also want to thank you, Mr. Ebert, for linking.
Mirrored from Antagonia.net.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 06:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 06:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 06:52 pm (UTC)But I didn't even notice the overall trend. That's kind of sad.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:05 pm (UTC)But yeah. I actually tried to get a female author for a bit, and as far as I can tell, there are only three in the system. But I can't find any writers of color at all.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2010-07-17 09:44 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2010-07-19 06:47 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 06:54 pm (UTC)I mean, obviously it's not restricted to "classics" because people like Dan Brown and Stephen King are in there.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:01 pm (UTC)I am curious about who is in the generator, too. I sent a message to the people who created the meme and linked my blog post.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:05 pm (UTC)It's a rather silly meme to begin with, and makes me wonder what criteria they are using for the comparison in the first place.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:17 pm (UTC)I found that every time I had a certain character's name in, I wound up with Mark Twain. I changed that character's name, and wound up with James Joyce.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:40 pm (UTC)I had fun plugging my own writing in but I don't really set any store in the answers it gave. How can anything "analyse" 1,500 words in 2 seconds enough to give even one tenth of an accurate result?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 10:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:44 pm (UTC)http://www.codingrobots.com/blog/2010/07/09/i-write-like/#comments
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 10:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:53 pm (UTC)Oh but I did post a little bit about it back to
The List
From:Re: The List
From:Re: The List
From:(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 10:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:52 pm (UTC)I for one would love to know why two different blog entries of mine, written on the same topic, had one come up as J.K. Rowling and another come up as Chuck Palahniuk. I hope you hear from the creators. Bet it's completely random or does a word count or something.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 07:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 08:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 08:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 09:49 pm (UTC)The thing is obviously just a stupid, inaccurate generator, but the creator should have realized that - gasp! - more than just white guys have written a few good novels.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-13 10:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-14 12:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-14 12:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-14 12:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-14 12:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-14 07:18 pm (UTC)BUT - this meme is not really content analysis, just limited word choice and sentence length.
(My thesis is based on [manual] content analysis of Web sites; my advisor is literally the one who wrote the book on the subject. Ask away is you want more details on content analysis.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-14 07:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-14 07:41 pm (UTC)Analyze This
Date: 2010-07-14 07:42 pm (UTC)Barack Obama = Charles Dickens
Sarah Palin = Stephen King
Rush Limbaugh = Margaret Atwood
David Vitter = Dan Brown
Billy Nungesser = Stephen King
Mitch Landrieu = Stephen King
Kibo = Dan Brown
Also, Driftglass also has something to say about this (http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2010/07/play-writer.html).
Re: Analyze This
Date: 2010-07-14 07:46 pm (UTC)Thanks for the link, it's interesting to see what people are thinking about this.
Re: Analyze This
From:(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-15 09:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-15 05:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-16 06:54 am (UTC)re the asserted white, male gender bias thing
Date: 2010-07-17 10:46 am (UTC)It is interesting that she entered the female writers and the analyzer (sp) came up with male authors. Actually, I had four women for the different styles I wrote out of the seven or eight or so. I would say my analyzer results were, given the greater number of famous male writers than females in the universe, was biased toward female authors. But, then, again, perhaps that is just something about me and how I look at the world, or not.
Sam
PS: Given the fame of the writers in the list, it would be interesting if the analyzer listed some main points as to what the likely reason was for their success in the market place. You know, target readers, demograghics, historical setting, etc., that kind of thing. Samuel Abram Helm
Re: re the asserted white, male gender bias thing
Date: 2010-07-17 01:29 pm (UTC)1) The issue isn't just that I "got" all male authors. The issue is that getting more female authors wasn't possible because the creator declined to put them into the program. There weren't any more female authors *to* get as results. The fact that you happened to get them says that you share a lot of vocabulary with the writers he did choose, but the meme was more likely overall to choose men because the meme writer did not program more women into the meme until several days after the meme launched. But for you, there's no reason you would have noticed this bias, because of your results. And I think many people were in the same boat. Looking at a limited sample, it is hard to be aware of the bias.
Which is somewhat understandable when looking at classical authors, but in the modern marketplace, there are loads of extremely popular female authors and extremely famous female authors. Many of them are considered more important than some of the male authors on this list, and they weren't included.
I also want to address your point of there being more male than female authors, because that is not true. The point, and one of the ones I was trying to share by analyzing this meme is that history and popular consciousness has been biased toward preserving the work of male authors over the work of female authors, and revering it as greater work. It's not that female authors have not existed-- it's that the "great books" school of teaching literature has largely ignored them, to the point that the person putting this meme together clearly didn't even notice the bias he'd programmed into his meme. And it's important to address that point and criticize it within ourselves, not just within a single specific internet toy. I see criticizing the meme as a jumping off point for a larger introspection.
There's also the issue of the fact that there is not a single author of color at all. Again, yes, there are perhaps fewer authors of color who are respected as great authors, but there are many who are. Toni Morrison is one of the most revered authors in America. She has won a Nobel *and* a Pulitzer, yet she is not on this list.
There are two points by which to be distressed by this-- the fact that we, in general, are so influenced by the bias of our oppressive history that we don't even notice when women or authors of color are excluded, and the attitude and response of the meme creator that he doesn't have a responsibility to correct this bias, and that women and people of color should be happy to be represented by white men, and that it is racist and sexist on the the part of people with marginalized voices to say, "hey, we're being marginalized."