Serendipity35

What is "deep text?"  It may have other meanings in the future, but right now Deep Text is an AI engine that Facebook is building. The goal of Deep Text is big - to understand the meaning and sentiment behind all of the text posted by users to Facebook. It is also intended that the engine will help identify content that people may be interested in, and also to weed out spam.

The genesis of Deep Text goes back to an AI paper published last year,"Text Understanding from Scratch," by Xiang Zhang and Yann LeCun.

Facebook pays attention to anything you type in the network, not just "posts" but also comments on other people's posts, Facebook researchers say that 70% of us regularly type and then decide not to post. They are interested in this self-censorship that occurs. Men are more likely to self-censor their social network posts, compared to women. Facebook tracks what you type, even if you never post it. 

Why does Facebook care? If they know what your typing is about, it can show it to other people who care about that topic, and, of course, it can better target ads to you and others.

This is not easy if you want to get deeper into the text. If you type the word "Uber" what does that mean? Do you need a ride? Are you complaining or complimenting the Uber service? What can Facebook know if you type "They are the Uber of food trucks"? 

This is a deep use of text analysis. With 400,000 new stories and 125,000 comments on public posts being shared every minute on Facebook, they need to analyze several thousand per second across 20 languages. A human might be able to do a few per minute, but obviously this is far beyond the capabilities of humans, The intelligence need to be artificial.

A piece on slate.com talks about how in Facebook Messenger might use Deep Text for chat bots to talk more like a human, interpreting text rather than giving programmed replies to anticipated queries. Saying "I need a new phone" is very different from "I just bought a new phone."The former opens the opportunity to suggest a purchase. The latter might mean you are open to writing a review.

Along with filtering spam, it could also filter abusive comments and to generally improve search from within Facebook.
Parsing text with software has been going on for decades. Machine scoring of writing samples has been an ongoing and controversial since it began. Ellis Batten Page discussed back in 1966 the possibility of scoring essays by computer, and in 1968 he published his successful work with a program called Project Essay Grade™ (PEG™). But the technology of that time, didn't allow computerized essay scoring to be cost-effective, Today, companies like Educational Testing Service offer these services, but what Facebook wants to do is quite different and in some ways more sophisticated.

Deep Text leverages several deep neural network architectures. These are things that are beyond my scope of knowledge - convolutional and recurrent neural nets, word-level and character-level based learning - but I will be using it, and so I want to understand what is going on behind the page.

If you read about Microsoft’s Tay chatbot, you know that it was artificial intelligence that was supposed to learn how to talk like a teenager. users gamed the software and "taught" it to talk like a Nazi, which became big news on social media. The bot was created by Microsoft's Technology and Research, and Bing divisions and named "Tay" as an acronym "thinking about you."

Facebook is testing Deep Text in limited and specific scenarios.

So, you're tired of your research languishing in some journal that no one reads anymore? You want your research to go viral. Good luck.

Right off, there is no formula for getting something to go viral. If there was a formula, marketers would be able to do it regularly. There are social media techniques - where and when to post, keywords to use, ways to encourage engagement. And there are ways to get more views that marketers do use that you wouldn't want near your serious research. (see clickbait)

Colleges produce a lot of research and are always hoping to get the information out into the field, but also into the popular press and media. As an article on chronicle.com points out, sharing discoveries with the "everyday citizens who pay the taxes or tuition that help keep them open" can be difficult. How do you engage them with esoteric research?  Researchers are generally not strong, and often not very interested, in media and self-promotion. Most of us are not Neil de Grasse Tyson

"Viral" these days is connected to social media rather than mainstream media. In fact, mainstream media monitors social media for stories on a daily basis.



The aforementioned article looks at how the University of California started a "research feed" on the social-media platform Tumblr as an experiment.They made the research Tumblr-friendly with things like animated GIFs. Visual are important. Keywords (tags) are important to improving search optimization. Following and reposting relevant posts from other research-related Tumblr feeds and media sites like The Washington Post and the Verge is important to build followers and hopefully they will return the follow and repost your research. A repost from The New York Times is great, and if it leads to the paper using the content in an article of their own, even better.

The University of California Research feed now has about 159,000 followers. That is more than double the number of followers of the UC Facebook page and Twitter feed combined, and they picked up followers such as public radio’s Science Friday and the Huffington Post.

I suspect that research might become viral or at least more popular because it is easy to understand, it seems to fit everyday observation and the implications of the theory are easy to implement. Plus, it is "marketed" properly, including by charismatic communicators. 

Should your research be on Tumblr? Yes, and Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, maybe even Instagram if it's very visual. Will it go viral? If the posts are engaging and the right people follow and repost your content, it may.

 

Comments. We don't have them turned on here at Serendipity35 any more. We were pounded over and over with spammers and so we turned them off more than a year ago. 

I thought about that as a read this piece on The New Yorker site that suggests that if the Internet were to receive its own Ten Commandments, one of them would be “Thou Shalt Not Read the Comments.”

The author says that there are "few online experiences more dispiriting, more arduously futile, than the downward scroll into the netherworld of half-assed provocations and inanities that exists beneath the typical opinion piece or YouTube video."

I miss our comments. The good ones, not the spam. I still think that part of the reason anyone should blog is to get some feedback from the world. But because this blog has such a long tail of posts, we became a target to spammers. last month we had 1140635 hits and that makes us a place a spammer want to put his link to Viagra and Beats headphones and Gucci bags and all the other crap that got sent our way. I have news for spammers and marketers: Tim and I post our own legitimate ads on this blog's sidebar to Amazon and such and they don't generate enough revenue after a few months to even get the two of a burger and beer at McGovern's.

I suppose I am shouting into the abyss with these posts if I can't even hear an echo of a comment.

That makes me think of when I was an undergrad at Rutgers and did some time at the college radio station, WRSU. We were just moving the station from AM to FM then and I got my FCC license and learned how to run the board and all that. I have always loved radio. But as a rookie, you got the unenviable time slots early in the morning or late at night and you wondered if anyone was out there listening.

At the time we were running The National Lampoon Radio Hour which was a very funny series of sketches. It was Saturday Night Live on the radio (with some of the same people, like Bill Murray). It was created, produced and written by staff from National Lampoon magazine and it lasted for a little over a year back in 1973 and 1974.

It originally was a radio HOUR but at some point while I was on the air, they cut it to 30 minutes, supposedly because they couldn't afford or didn't have the time to put together enough material required for a one-hour show.

That first half-hour show made mention at the end that some wimpy radio stations were not going to play the second half of the hour because that was the part with all the dirty stuff. Of course, the show ended there. And the station got calls from angry listeners that were mad because they couldn't hear the second half and because the college station was too wimpy to play it. I was unable to convince these callers that there was no second half and that it was just another gag. It was one of the rare times I knew someone was out there listening.

I am prepping for my fall graduate course in social media at NJIT and I'm looking at my list of  book titles for outside reading on social media, and some related digital design topics. The original list of titles was crowdsourced on this blog and updated  2 years later. The latest additions are based on outside reading by myself and recommendations from the last group of students who took the social media course. New suggestions welcomed.

1. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success - Safko


2. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins - web 2.0 technologies and trends in the context of participatory culture.


3. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green


4. Social Media for Social Good: A How-to Guide for Nonprofits - Heather Mansfield


5. Social Media: Dominating Strategies for Social Media Marketing with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram


6. What Would Google Do? - Jeff Jarvis


7. Googled: The End of the World as We Know It   Ken Auletta


8. The Art of Social Media - by Guy Kawasaki & Peg Fitzpatrick


9. Power Friending - Amber MacArthur


10. 101 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits: A Field Guide - by Melanie Mathos & Chad Norman


11. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Clay Shirky


12. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies  Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li


13. Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies - by Jan Zimmerman & Deborah Ng Yes, there's a "dummies" book for SM too


14. Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site -  by Gavin Bell


15. Social Media Explained: Untangling the World's Most Misunderstood Business Trend - by Mark Schaefer


16. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business - Erik Qualman


17. Designing for the Social Web - Joshua Porter


18. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future - S. Craig Watkins


19. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - best practices for starting a social website with a focus on design focus


20. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler - though not a text on social media, law professor at Yale University, Benkler has made the entire book available for free download and a few chapters are very good at generating thoughts about the emergence of social software  http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/


21. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. - Mitch Joel - a business focus on using Net marketing, especially. free tools and services


22. Shel Israel - Twitterville


23. Chris Brogan and Julian Smith - Trust Agents


24. The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging


25. David Meerman Scott's New Rules of Marketing & PR


26. Paul Gillin - The New Influencers


27. Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge - Putting the Public Back in Public Relations


28. David Kirkpatrick The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that's Connecting the World (Jan 2010)


29. Tim O'Reilly and Sara Milstein -  The Twitter Book


30. The Zen of Social Media Marketing - by Shama Hyder


31. Bob Garfield  -  Chaos Scenario


32. David Meerman Scott  - World Wide Rave


33. Adam Penenberg' -  Viral Loop


34. Enterprise 2.0  -  Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise


35. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation - Tim Brown


36. The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business - Hunt


37. The Cluetrain Manifesto - though ten years old, this book on the networked marketplace probably makes more sense today in its observations about how the Internet continues to change business.


38. Visual Thinking by Rudolf Arnheim - probably more in the art and visual design world, but his premise that all thinking is basically perceptual and the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading.