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Research Proposal on Urban Legends and the Internet

Research Proposal on Urban Legends and the Internet Introduction “Urban Legends” is a genre we often confer to fictional and semi-fictional stories that circulate through modern communities. Generally this describes stories that few people truly believe, but are still told and retold time and time again. These stories often have common features, they leverage the unintuitiveness of modern life, a sense of distant credibility (“This happened to a friend of a friend”), and in some cases a sociopolitical call-to-action.

Color Analysis of Bandcamp Album Cover Art

Introduction The internet has allowed any artist to share their work with the world, and in many cases be paid for it. This is mostly a recent development, with the creation of online marketplaces, and patronage services. The defining marketplace for the indie music scene on the internet is Bandcamp. Although it has been difficult to find an estimate for how large this marketplace actually is, Bandcamp does report some information about how much money has been spent on their platform.

Bandcamp Cover Art Preliminary Analysis

Preliminary Analysis This will document the process of doing preliminary analysis on bandcamp album covers. This is part of an ongoing project which can be found here and on github. The goals of this exploration are to look into the viability of using machine learning methods in this setting. Selected methods will be fully automated and utilized for the final analysis. The './covers/' directory was generated from the album_cover_scrape function.

Plurals and ML

Plurals and Machine Learning Using older machine learning models to conjugate English verbs produced rather silly results. These models performed at an acceptable level for many words, but when given nonsense words as an input these models would produce humorous conjugations. For example, we have: Verb Human Generated Past-Tense Machine Generated Past-Tense mail mailed membled conflict conflicted conflafted wink winked wok quiver quivered quess satisfy satisfied sedderded smairf smairfed sprurice trilb tribled treelilt smeej smeejed leefloag frilg frilged freezled Naturally, my girlfriend and I found this hilarious.