Gender Genie confirms I’m a man, pretty much
April 20th, 2007 by David Weinberger
The Gender Genie at the BookBlog uses an algorithm “developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.” You paste in some text (preferably more than 500 words) and it guesses the author’s sex.
The first 1,200 words of the first chapter of Everything Is Miscellaneous gets 2,634 male points and 2,215 female points. The last chapter (5,000 words) scores 8,560 male points and 6,506 female points. My 1,200 words post live-blogging Wendy Seltzer’s talk about copyright scores a similar 1,684 male points and 1,452 female.
The consistency suggests that the Gender Genie is measuring something real, some implicit metadata invisible to me but characteristic of my writing. And if it in fact gets authors’ sex right, it is even stronger evidence — as if we needed it — that so much of our meaning lives in what we don’t see. [Tags: metadata gender ]
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