Ben Nagy

wow whose was it??

A Mandaic curse bowl in the Royal Ontario Museum. It has a spiraling Mandaic text that leads to an encircled x at the center.

This Super Bowl Sunday, I’d like to introduce you all to the magical curse bowls used in Upper Mesopotamia and Syria in late antiquity. Written in Mandaic (as here) or Syriac Aramaic, they trap demons who trespass on a household by sucking them in with spiraling spells to the center of the bowl.

Happy birthday to 2 ancient Greek mathematicians: Vettius Valens (1906 yrs old today) and Proclus Diadochus (1614 today). Valens was an astronomer and working astrologer, born #onthisday 120 CE. Proclus a Neoplatonist philosopher born 412 CE. Both super important to understanding of ancient thought.

Photo by G. Solecki/A. Piętak of a small figurine of a bear carved out of amber between 9600 and 4100 BC. The amber is a deep translucent orange. The display lighting makes it glow in places. The bear's head is carved to show ears, mouth, nostrils and eyes. A hole runs through the bear’s torso, suggesting it was threaded onto a cord. Dimensions: Length 10.2 cm, Height 4.2 It was discovered in Słupsk during peat mining in 1887. According to the museum catalogue ‘’Shortly after its discovery, the figure underwent conservation work to restore its original appearance as it was covered with a layer of dull patina from the exposure to the minerals contained in the peat. Already at that time, at the end of the 19th century, it was assumed the restoration had gone too far. The figure was stripped entirely of patina, the anatomical features of the animal were emphasised, the eyes and nostrils were sharply drawn, and the amber was carefully polished”. In 2013, a competition was organised by the Education Department of the National Museum in Szczecin, for children to choose a name for the bear. The winning name was ‘Słupcio’,

A little bear figurine carved out of amber some 6,000 years ago 🐻❤️

A hole runs through the bear’s torso suggesting it was threaded on a cord, perhaps worn or carried as a protective charm.

Found in a peat bog near Słupsk, Poland, in 1887.

📷 National Museum in Szczecin

#FindsFriday
#Archaeology

CfP on a marvelous topic, imho, especially because I organise the conference myself (with Sébastien Moureau): "Verbositas Arabica, implicatio Graeca, paucitas Latina. Multilingual Text Traditions in the Middle Ages (8th–14th Century)" (20–22 Jan 2027). #medievalsky
hiw.kuleuven.be/dwmc/researc...

YouTube video by Richard McElreath Statistical Rethinking 2026 Lecture B05 - Social Networks II

Witness the power of this fully operational Bayesian latent space social relations model - Lecture B05 of Statistical Rethinking 2026. Incremental model construction and testing workflow for dyadic and generalized exchange networks, posterior network simulation, one dank Insane Clown Posse meme.

(oh - nerd stuff...

The font is Roboto Slab which I am getting into as a readable slide font. Main python packages are xgboost and shap, syntax parsing via UDPipe EvaLatin24 lindat.mff.cuni.cz/services/udp... with a bunch of bespoke scaffolding. Dataviz is via shap package or crappy matplotlib)

and, as I always try to do, if you're on the computational side and you'd like to play around with this kind of thing, I have the complete corpus (downloaded from hypotactic.com) plus all the processing and analysis code freely available under CC-BY.

So, if we have to put Ovidian poems in boxes (like 'male' vs 'female') we are much better, imho, making those boxes about genre. I'm not saying that "identifying as pale elegiac lover" is a useful gender in terms of analysis ...

... but also, honestly, I'm not *not* saying that.

No “female poetic voice” Ovid’s technical style is Ovid “gender” vs “genre”

So, no, Ovid doesn't "channel" a distinct feminine poetic voice or have some kind of multiple personalities *in the way he builds poetry*. That all happens in the meanings that are made. There's tons of interesting gender stuff happening, but it's conscious.

A beeswarm plot showing lexical differences between Ars and Heroides

The same thing is obvious with the words, predictably.

It's critical to note that male Double letters are almost exactly like this. There are many differences we can extract with close reading of the poems, but the *way* Ovid uses language is indistinguishable - we are talking linguistics here, not literary analysis.

A passage from the Ars showing imperatives, jussive subjunctives and future irrealis (if this then do that)

A passage from Heroides 5 (Oenone) showing past tenses, first person verbs and personal pronouns (constructions describing her experiences)

Here's what's happening. These are two of the most "male" vs "female" excerpts. In the Ars we have an instruction manual, so we have "do this, don't do that" and "if this, then that (future)".

In the Heroides, we have letters, so people write about things that have happened to them.

A SHAP "beeswarm" plot. Left is Ars, Right is Heroides, redder dots have more of the given feature

Using Shapley Values, we can understand the model. The Ars has a lot of 3rd person, Imperatives, and Subjunctives. The Heroides have 1st person, personal pronouns and past tenses.

Does this mean that Ovid writes women as talking about themselves and using less sophisticated grammar? No, not at all

Seems good, right?

All double Heroides single sentences are detected as "female" because actually the model learned to predict Heroides vs Ars.

But there's a big problem. I then evaluated the model performance on the Double Heroides, 3 letters "by" males and 3 by females. The model completely fails to distinguish them. In other words the differences aren't gender, they're genre.

A confusion matrix illustrating the text of the post

Using these features, I trained a machine-learning model (XGBoost) to predict male vs female speaker. The model does an extremely good job - with 25 sentences (around 250 words) the F1 score is in the mid 90s, which is pretty impressive.

pre-processed text of Heroides 1.1-2 showing POS masking, lemmatisation and some grammatical features

To do this, I took the text of the Ars Amatoria (creepy male character talking about pickup techniques) and the 15 single Heroides, letters written from the perspective of famous women from mythology.

I focused on syntax and grammar by using POS masking, lemmatisation, and grammatical features

Is there stylometric evidence to support the argument that Ovid has a distinct female poetic style?

No.

I presented a little research project this week in Aotearoa at the regional classics conference. Here I was testing the idea that Ovid has a distinct style in the way he uses language when writing as a male vs female poetic speaker.

He doesn't.

congrats! 🎉

Casablanca what is your nationality I'm a drunkard

Initial 'Q'(uid) with interlace and intertwined animals at the beginning of Book I of the Georgics

BL Harley 2533; Virgil, Bucolica (ff. 1-14v), and Georgica (ff. 14v-48v); 2nd or 3rd quarter of the 12th century; France, S; f.14v

I have said it before, and I will say it again - trochaic octameter is too long to be a line and we should think of it as 4+4

it probably depends how much adhd you have

Sticker of the Romulus and Remus haunted wolf mosaic with text I got that dog in me from archaeotees

I am sure many of you have written brilliant books and I am sure I will buy them at #aiascs but this is by far my favorite exhibition hall purchase so far

Excerpt of a page in medieval manuscript containing information about herbs and their uses. Right hand column contains the text in brownish-black ink, with a capital S in red with blue pen-flourishes that starts the paragraph on 'allia' / garlic. Left hand column contains summary of main medical uses of garlic, written in red ink by the same hand has the main text. Left column is occasionally intersperced with translation glosses of the main headword, added by a later hand. Black ink reads 'Haus .Garlec.' to indicate the Middle French and Middle English words for 'allia'. The Parker Library, CCCC MS 438, f. 21v

Trilingualism in action: Latin book on herbs & their uses gets translation annotations of some head words to French & English

Things I learned: 'haus' (Middle French) is a (rare) plural form of 'allia' (Latin), aka 'garlec' (Middle English)

CCCC MS 438, f. 21v
parker.stanford.edu/parker/catal...

necromancy is woefully neglected in the modern academy 😔

GitHub - mimno/sklearn-gibbs-lda: sklearn-compatible LDA using collapsed Gibbs sampling with Numba optimization sklearn-compatible LDA using collapsed Gibbs sampling with Numba optimization - mimno/sklearn-gibbs-lda

Drop-in replacement for sklearn LDA using MCMC and hyperparameter optimization: github.com/mimno/sklear...

screen shot of lecture playlist links and table of lecture topics

Possums in your yard? News got you down? Fear not, I have made playlists for the A and B sections of my ongoing Statistical Rethinking course. Click the section of your choice, sit back, and forget the possums and decay of the international order while your brain updates. github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Vous en avez marre des GAFAM et de l’ultra dépendance aux services US ? Voici des solutions, toutes présentes dans notre fiction en accès libre « GAFAM : 24h dans la peau d’un repenti ».

Si vous avez des suggestions, n’hésitez pas à en donner en commentaires 🙏🏼