National education is an example of, you know, I think most of us think it's kind of good for people to be able to read and whatnot, but it's also a force for cultural oppression and homogenization. So for example, for about 500 years in the country I currently live in, if a school child spoke Welsh in a school, you would hang a sign around their neck as a badge of shame, and that is called the Welsh Knot. So now I will just look very briefly at the relationship of language to nation building, comparing the 19th century Europe with modern Asia as a sort of context for fieldwork and language documentation. So in 19th century Europe, linguistic description was a cornerstone of nation building in at least three ways. Philology of ancient varieties of national vernaculars, think of like the Germanic sagas, for example, one way you were a nationalist was to look at what was the medieval poetry in my vernacular. Then also there was work done in dialectology, dialect grammars and dictionaries, also dialect maps, and that's the third one is systematic dialect geography, where there is this notion particularly in Germany, but then also in later France, of like to really appreciate who the German people are. We need to really study Germany as it's spoken in each of the German speaking villages and understand dialectology and folk traditions. So for whatever reason, these elements of nationalism do not seem to be repeating themselves in Asia. That's my observation. Philology of ancient varieties, everyone pays lip service to it, but only in China do you see major investment like in India, as much as the BJP loves Sanskrit, you don't see people pouring over Sanskrit texts and doing editions of Sanskrit texts as a kind of manifestation of Hindu nationalism. And as far as dialect grammars and dictionaries go, there's a little bit of work here and there, but again, it really doesn't seem like the modern states of Asia feel the need to express their national identity through linguistic fieldwork. And that's worrying, I think, because it means that those pressures on decreasing linguistic diversity that come with nation states like national education and increased travel are there, but the countervailing pressures of documenting and celebrating linguistic diversity are not there like they were in 19th century Europe. So now I just look very briefly at how things are going here in the UK. So Welsh is doing well, Scott's Gaelic could be doing better, Cornish died in 1777, Manx died in 1974, but there are revitalization efforts going on with Cornish and Manx. And then I think that something that can focus our minds is that the Cornish and the Manx have been able to do revitalization because the languages were well studied and well documented, whereas, for instance, when when Minyak disappears or or what have you, it's not clear that that even if a community later wanted to revive it, that they could because there wouldn't be enough done. So our job in as let's say as historical linguists by virtue of historical linguistics needing to look at a variety of languages from a family. And our job as descriptive linguists looking at the range of languages in the world is a very hard one because of the quick pace of cultural homogenization backed by national governments and corporations and and documentary linguistics has even fewer resources than it did in the 19th century is is my perception that in the 19th century, you could go to a a national government or an academy and say, give me loads of money to study dialect diversity, for example, and they would, whereas that's not so much the case anymore. So we need technology to help us. So let's look at some new technologies. Well, just to kind of focus on this this this theme that I'm elaborating of of technology brings you improved standards of living, if you like, increased productivity, but also new forms of oppression. I think this is very true with the very technologies in a way that I'll be talking about. So looking at the role of digital communication in controversies such as the surveillance of the NSA revealed by Edward Snowden and the Cambridge Analytica's role in the Trump election in 2016. But we can if we're sophisticated users of technology also resist these forms of oppression. So for instance, there's the Tor browser, which is a which is a browser that cannot be monitored by governments. So I use that myself a lot. It's not very good for making bookings at restaurants. I'll have you know, and you can also have encrypted email accounts like proton mail is the one that I recommend. And now moving from this general situation of kind of how has technology shaped the modern world in terms of increased productivity and increased oppression and the ability to resist that oppression. Let's look at how those same tendencies are manifesting in academia, I think broadly.  And I have been sort of surprised actually in the past that some of these things have not been known to to to PhD students, for example. So so I think it's worth talking them through. So I'm going to look at YouTube library Genesis since I have in particular. So in the context of my ERC grant that just ended in August, we put a lot of the talks on YouTube. And I think that's hugely advantageous to scholarly dissemination. And I think actually that one of the advantages of the coronavirus that we're seeing now is that academics who tend to be very conservative are are are figuring out how to use technologies. And you can do things like have people from all around the world attend a doctoral school. But also I think we should try to put as much of that as it makes sense to into the into public access. And just imagine if you know, we were able to watch talks by Brugman or Deis or sewer or the greats of linguistic history. Well, I think we if we find that idea attractive, we owe it to the future to try to document some of our presentations. So that that now that it's technologically possible, it can can be realized. So now I will talk about library Genesis. So this is a way to find books and books in particular, it works a lot like a library catalog, the you have to check the URLs, because because it depending on where you live, or what's going on in the world, the URL can change. So I put in to this search window Nathan Hill Tibetan. And then, like in a library catalog, various things come up. And one of them is my 2019 book. And then you click on it. You can get the PDF file and there's a book. Yeah, so you've just saved yourself 85 pounds and have a relatively new book. So especially again, in the coronavirus time, this is a way of you know, accessing scholarly resources that might not be as accessible as they were in the past. And then if we look at Sci Hub, that's better better for articles. So similarly, you may have to check what the URL is. And you can basically just Google something like where is Sci Hub now. In this case, first we go to the homepage of the article in question. So I found one here use of reflectance transformation imaging in recording and analyses of Burmese Pew Inscriptions. And we've looked for the DOI. You see the DOI at the bottom. The DOI is a unique identifier like an ISBN number for a book. And then you can copy that. Of course, if you have access to this journal, you can just click through to the journal, but I'm presuming maybe you don't. They want to charge you 30 pounds for looking at this article, something like that. So then you go to Sci Hub, you put in the DOI, and then it brings the article right up. So that is a way to get respectively books and articles using, you know, new technological resources in the 21st century. Although I should mention that whether or not it's legal is something you should consider for yourself in your jurisdiction. In Burma, it would be perfectly legal. Yeah. So that's it for very sort of generic research technological resources of scholarship in general. Now I will look at something specific to language documentation. So there are a bunch now of language archives, which so what is a language archive? Yeah, when you when you document a language or produce sound files, video files, it's a place that can host in perpetuity those files in some kind of curated fashion. And I'm going to look at them a little bit, you know, one at a time. So this is a one called Paradisac, which is based in Australia and is particularly strong in Australian languages. I'm not super familiar with it, but some colleagues who whose opinion I respect a lot like it a great deal. It doesn't charge money for deposits and is quite accessible. Next, I'll mention ELAR, the Endangered Languages Archive, which is based at SOAS and personally, I find it quite difficult to use. It's hard to figure out whether they have a resource on your language that or the language you're interested in. In many cases, the or I should explain that this is tied to a grant program, the Endangered Languages Documentation Project, where if you're given a grant by the Endangered Languages Documentation Project, you're expected to deposit your data in the Endangered Languages Archive. Now, a lot of people, I would say as many as half of the people who get these grants do not end up depositing their data because they're bad. But the system still records a deposit that's waiting for them to deposit their data. Just for example, inside of Tibetan linguistics, Mark Post is someone who got a grant to, I think, work on Gallo and his deposit is listed, but there's no files. Then it just makes you feel crazy because you look, you see there's a deposit, you can't find any files, you think you've done something wrong, whereas it's actually that the depositor hasn't put anything in there. You have to have an account to use it, so it's not my favorite, although I should say all the decisions that have been made in deference to my SOAS colleagues were made for reasons that do make sense for some circumstances. Then here is Dobez, which was associated with a grant program by the Volkswagen Foundation, which is now closed, but they still will host new data. Without going into too many details, my complaints are similar. I find it hard to find things. A lot of things aren't accessible. There's different levels of security. My personal favorite endangered language archive, if you like, is the Pangloss archive, based at the CNRS in Paris, specifically at the Lassito lab. Why do I like it? I like it because it has an extremely flat structure. There's no sort of, oh, look here, look there, log in, get permissions.  What you see is what you get. In general, you like here, you get a sound file that's glossed, that's translated. I'll stick on this one for a little while. It's a small enterprise and very French, which makes sense, is based at the French lab. It's paid for by the French taxpayers. That does mean that it tends to be languages that were studied by people who work at Lassito that are covered. That's good for me because that lab has done a lot of work on sign-out languages. I think it's worth noting that they will take deposits from the public as long as you format your data and whatnot in a way that's easy for them to ingest. I would recommend that. I think that if you're going to go to the trouble of really formatting your data for an archive anyhow, you might as well go with pan gloss. At the technical level, every deposit gets a DOI, which is not true for example at ELAR, and that DOI is resolvable down to the sentence level. Then if you want to cite, for example, someone's data in a paper of yours, you can just give that DOI that then will take someone immediately to that exact sentence that you're citing. That is also the cutting edge of scholarly practice. Pause on that thought. I like the pan gloss archive and would encourage you to take a look at it. Also, if you are in the language documentation business or doing some fieldwork yourself, consider giving your data to the pan gloss archive. In terms of transition, let me just say another thing I want to tell you about is the no-do. It is a generic data research repository supported by the EU and specifically by SAM, where they do the atom smashing. Most of the data in it, like you see here, is from hard sciences. I think it's worth us asking ourselves, why do we need special language archives? Language data is just research data, so why can't we use a research data repository like Zenodo? Now I'll just tell you what's good about Zenodo is it's totally free, extremely easy to use. There's no upper limit on a number of deposits and a single deposit can be up to 50 gigabytes. It's just the most user-friendly thing out there, and each deposit generates a citation and a DOI, so it also gives a lot of advantages in terms of citation practices. What are the disadvantages? The only disadvantage really is that it doesn't provide a good interface or user experience for people to look at your data online. I would say that's been an emphasis in the design of other language archives. You can play a video and you can look at the transcription while you play the video, whereas in Zenodo it's just here are my files, you can download them and then you can read them on your own computer if you want to. But I think that's not so bad. I think that if we make it easier for researchers to share their data, then more researchers will share their data. The more people share their data, the more we'll be able to have a kind of a rigorous scientific enterprise where our findings are verifiable and maybe too much effort has been spent on worrying about making lovely interfaces for language archives. That's my pitch for Zenodo. Personally, when I get an article these days on a morpheme or something in a language that's based on fieldwork, I ask to see the data because I think that's good practice. We should all be sharing our data and making the relationship between our data and our research findings clear. Now I'm going to talk about auto-completion keyboards, which I've moved here because it's more a technology that benefits communities that use under-study languages than a technology per se that benefits researchers, but I think it's exciting and useful and wants to draw people's attention to it. One thing that I've even had trouble explaining sometimes is what is an auto-completion keyboard. I'll get to that in a second, but you all use them all the time. Using these sorts of keyboards, let's say, is participating in the spying on us by major corporations, but we all do it when we use our own phones. My own feeling is the benefit of participating in that spying regime is that you get better commercial products for your language, and that would be a good thing for minority languages to participate in. This is what I just mentioned. There are privacy issues around the collection of data, but let's look at Microsoft Swift Key, which is the auto-completion keyboard that I use, and that I've helped in developing. This is a screenshot from my phone, and you see there's Tibetan and there's Welsh. Our languages that I have used, and then it suggests some other languages based on your location. This is me just proving that it works for a language, Atom, where basically a friend of mine gave us some data for making an Atom model, and he couldn't figure out how to use it, so I was just showing him how to use it, but I don't actually know Atom. The point is just we type something and then it says maybe the next word you want to use is this one. I think everyone probably uses auto-completion keyboards on their phones, but I have found that when I've tried to get linguists to give us data, they've said, what's an auto-completion keyboard? Why should my language community want one? But when you type and you say, hello, and then your phone says, do you want to say, how are you? And then you say, yeah, okay, I'll say, how are you? That's an auto-completion keyboard. And there's a lot of linguistics research that goes into making them. So just let's look at some a mix of, this is mostly Sino-Tibetan languages and Filipino languages to give you a sense of what's in Microsoft Swift key. And I myself have been involved in Tibetan, Hmong, Crusoe, Atom, Honey, and Galo. And you see the number of users and the vocabulary size. And here I just, the point I want to make is kind of the usefulness of documentary linguistics to real people, right? There are 5,311 people in Mizoram who are using this software on their phone to write in Mizo. So a little bit of work by a linguist has really helped these 5,000 people. And in some cases, which is a point to keep in mind, the numbers look good, like 2,000 Tibetans, almost 3,000 Tibetans, but there are 6 million Tibetans. So it's not good sort of, let's say to use commercial terms, market penetration. But if you look down at Atom, 157 Atom users, there's only about 2,000 people who speak Atom. So I think 157 is not so bad. So that's what, now I'm done talking about auto completion keyboards, but I'll say part of the reason why I'm doing it is a pitch, which is that if you look at Microsoft Swift Key and there's a language there that you would like to be there, that is not currently there, that you have some data on, then you can talk to me, and I'll talk to my friend Julian, who I've worked with, making some of these models, and we can add it. So I think that's a good opportunity for helping communities that use less supported languages. So now I will get into the actual discussion of the workflow of documentary linguistics, and then at some point, switching over into comparative linguistics as we get to that point in the workflow. And there are basically three phases that I'm going to break it down into. The first one is automatic speech recognition. The second one is natural language processing tools writ large, but there's this notion that's been kicking around since I think the late 90s, basic language resource kit, which I think is a useful notion. So I will discuss that. And then computer assisted language comparison, which is to say that the contribution of technological development to historical linguistics per se, and just sort of to give you this sort of overview perspective, this second one, NLP is where most linguistic research in commercial enterprises happens. So Microsoft, Facebook, Google have lots of people doing NLP. And for them, automatic speech recognition has been one NLP task. But for us, I think it's good to separate that because the way you approach it, if you're working on a language with a lot of resources, and the way you approach it, if you're working on language with few resources, are very different. So the extensive commercial research in NLP doesn't really advantage us that much when it comes to automatic speech recognition, but it does for other tasks. And then computer assisted language comparison. Well, of course, you know, commercial enterprises have not been super interested in reconstructing proto languages. That's no surprise. There's not a lot of money in it. So that's not something that comes under the rubric of NLP really either. Okay, so now I will look at automatic speech recognition. And just to remind ourselves that our sort of goal, if you like, is to have interlinear glossing so that you might have a little bit of a sound file corresponding to its transcription into the IPA. And then you would have a that broken up into words or morphemes. Then under each word or morpheme, you will have a analysis of it. And that's the glossing. And then you might have a sentence by sentence translation or some notes. So this process of changing your raw recordings into in your linear glossed text is extremely laborious. And to some extent necessary for using linguistic field work in further research. But it's a real bottleneck in terms of people's time. So I think basically everyone out there has far more recordings than they've been able to gloss. And let's just say that this standard, this practice of interlinear gloss text, it's not, for example, at all common in Indo-European. But it has been used since the 1900s. And here, for instance, is an example of Franz Boas, who did a lot of work on native languages of North America. And you see down at the bottom, he gives the forms and the glosses underneath them. So let's look at recent developments and basically, to some extent, my whole discussion here is an extended advertisement for the work of Oliver Adams and Alexi Michaud. And I have had a little bit of involvement, but a very tangential one. I'm more of a sort of fan. But I think this is a bandwagon to get on. So I commend it to you. So Oliver Adams did his PhD at the University of Melbourne. Now actually works in a commercial NLP company. And probably everyone has heard about neural networks. I noticed them about five years ago, but they've really taken over artificial intelligence research agendas. And that's what he is using. The input is audio and transcription aligned at the sentence level. And you need to train a model for the language and, in fact, the speaker that you work with. And this is where it's different than the big languages. So for English, you just buy whatever, buy yourself an iPhone, turn it on, start talking to it. It writes down what you say. Well, that's because a huge amount of existing resources were already invested in that. Whereas we're starting from nothing and trying to make progress in a way that benefits us as researchers as quickly as possible. So there's no, how can I say, there's no one size fits all answer. Each language is different. Each speaker is different. But generally speaking, one hour of existing very accurate glossed texts is necessary to train a model. And if you have more than that, that's better. And here is the input training, for example, where we have time aligned sound files with a transcription into the IPA. And one reason this worked well with Oliver and Alexi is that Alexi is interested in phonetics. So he makes very accurate transcriptions where, you know, if someone pauses, if someone says um or something, he writes it in there. Because many linguists kind of, even without noticing it, edit the text as they go. And you can't do that because a computer is listening to the sound file. So it needs to compare it to what the sound file actually says, not to some idealized version of what it should say. So in terms of, let's say, even at this stage, a recommendation to you is if you're doing fieldwork on a language that and you might want to take advantage of this set of tools, when you do transcriptions, please do them as precisely as possible, where where you write down what's actually said by the speaker, not any kind of cleaning up. So now just looking at the, well, this yeah, this is just a slide showing the the preparation of a new transcription. And here it is in practice, where you have a line by line. And I know, I know you're not going to read this just because it's a bunch of IPA for a language you don't know. But the the for each line, there's the first one is the reference, which is the correct transcription. And then the hype is the hypothesized transcription by the machine. And just based on the on listening to the sound file. So the point for our purposes is that it looks pretty good, right? Like, just I mean, just look at any one spot and you say, Oh, yeah, the the IPA symbols on the top line look a lot like the IPA symbols on the second line. So this can radically increase the speed at which linguists prepare transcriptions. But it's worth noticing that that that this slide may kind of overstate experientially the accuracy of the system, because common words, it will learn well. Yeah, that's just a machine is like a person in that way. Whereas less common words, it will learn less well. So here is an example of a four syllable name that comes up in the in the transcription. And sorry, in the texts. And what you see here is a bunch of different sentences that the same name comes up in. So the on the left is the IDs for the sentences. And then at the very bottom, you get the correct transcription. Yeah, the, the, you know, Alexi as a linguist has analyzed the phonological form of this name as having this this form. And you notice that basically every time the system sees the name, it does something different. It's because a four syllable name is not something it saw enough examples of in the training to to feel confident about. But still, I think correcting these incorrect transcriptions will be a lot easier than typing in those the the correct transcription in the first place. So so even when it's making mistakes, it's saving you time. So this is just an example of the wave file and the the alignment of the sound file with the transcription. And you what's happened here is that the person has repeated the the word and that in the second occurrence, it has it has it has not identified it. And the point that the slide is making is that the reason it hasn't identified it correctly is because of this globalization, which is to say even when the computer is making mistakes, they're not random mistakes. They're mistakes that are related to the phonetics that it finds in the wave file. So even its mistakes can teach us things and provide linguistic insight. So here, I'm just listing a few publications about this endeavor. It's quite new about two years old, making quick progress. So hopefully in in the future in the near future, this set of of tools, these technologies can be incorporated just into the workflow of linguists. And then I hope this this works. I just want to show you a clip of a YouTube video where you can see this tool. The tool is called Persephone in action. So I'm going to allow. But now I think can you see the YouTube or do you see the slide still? The slide. Okay, the slide here. Okay, then I think I need to stop sharing. And Christoph, you have to be sure that you can share the sound. So now can you see the the YouTube? Yes. Yes, okay. Well, I mean, you can always let's say even if the sound doesn't work, then you can try yourself in the future. But let's give it a try. See what happens. Yeah, sure. So that's all we need to do to install Persephone Elan. In that way, it's just like any other plugin, any other recognizer that's been developed for Elan so far. Once it's installed, we can open Elan and actually apply an existing Persephone phoning recognition model. I should have said so. This is a kind of a half hour talk about an extension for Elan that uses this Persephone tool. And I'm skipping the whole first part where he's like, okay, this is what Persephone is. This is how you fit into Elan to get close to where you get to see it in action. And because that's the sort of dramatic climax that I want is to see it in action. But but but I'm starting it a little bit earlier so that I can let Christopher Cox kind of set up its use himself. So I'll continue. Now, to do that, we do need to tell Persephone a little bit, pardon me, Persephone Elan, a little bit about our Persephone model. So specifically, we need to let it know the folder where a Persephone model or experiment is, how that model was configured. So specifically, which feature types we use, what venetic features, and what labels we use to provide the text, and where the original training data for that model are. Persephone Elan feeds that information back into Persephone behind the scenes to reboot that model essentially, and then apply it to these new unseen snippets of audio that we're getting from Elan transcript. Now, I'm hoping over time that we can make changes to the Persephone source code to actually save these settings inside the model themselves. So the only thing we need to provide the Persephone Elan is the path to our pre-trained model. But for now, this is information that we have to enter manually into the Persephone Elan interface. For myself, once I've trained up a model in Persephone, I usually just keep a small text file that has all of this information there. In the example we'll see in a second, I've entered this information in the appropriate fields already. But again, these are the things that you should be able to recover from your model training process fairly easily. So again, here's a short video showing what this looks like. So here we have the transcript. And this is, again, the Tutama language with Alder Bruce Starlights. So you can see we have a number of empty annotations or textless annotations on a main tier. What we want to do is provide that tier to Persephone's phoning recognizer. So in the Recognizers tab, we select Persephone phoning recognizer. And then we provide the settings I was just describing. In this case, we trained our model using fbank for phonetic features. The text that was provided this model, all those text snippets had this file extension. Again, this will look a little bit different for your particular model. We've built in support for Tutama's orthography here. But again, in your case, you'd most likely choose none. And what you'll get then are the actual phoneme strings that come out of Persephone with no conversions happening behind the scenes. We want to provide this BRS tier. That's the tier that contains all of the empty annotations that Persephone is going to try to recognize. Lastly, we want to provide a reference to the directory where the original training data is. So in this case for the Tutama model that we're being never using here. And lastly, excuse me, to the model itself, to the source experiment directory. There's a final field here as well for output recognized text. This is essentially just a junk file we can't get away with producing. Elan makes us do this. Don't worry too much about it. Once we hit start, Persephone Elan will start picking out all the individual clips from that tier, reload the Persephone model that we provided, and then actually ask Persephone to start transcribing each of the clips on that tier. So each annotation can be fed to it. When we're ready, it'll load the corresponding tiers and we can listen to the results. You can see here it's recognized in only segments, but also the tones that are marked with diacritics. So as we mentioned before, there are a number of settings that you need to have. Okay, that's the part I wanted to show you.  Okay, and I don't know whether you thought that was cool or not, but I think it's pretty cool that the computer just filled in the IPA with the tone marks, correct? And although it took him some training data, I think in this case about three hours of training data and struggling with a computer to train a model and whatnot, once he's done that, then it works forever and he can do 10 hours, 20 hours, 50 hours and it's much faster to make progress. And also, as you saw in Linda's presentation yesterday, Ilan is a very standard piece of software to use in language documentation. So the point of this video and this tool that Chris Cox has made is that it shows you can incorporate this kind of quite clunky computer-experty thing, Persephone, into an environment that is, I mean, I don't know whether it's more user-friendly or not, but is already being used by a lot of documentary lists. So that's the end of the section of my presentation on automatic speech recognition. And I would now move on to the next part about NLP, but we're close to, I don't know, we're 80 minutes away from the half-hour mark, so I think it's maybe better to pause here than to press ahead, but I'll defer to what Christoph tells me. Well, let's the majority decide. It's half an hour too much, maybe, and or rather have 10 minutes and then close a bit earlier. What is your feeling? Why don't we, or let's say probably, let's all do one more section, I'll do the section on NLP, and then we'll maybe be a little bit past the half-hour mark, but we won't be so late, and then we'll see where we are. Okay, so now in terms of this workflow, we've already gotten from having sound files to having some textual representation of our language, and that might be IPA, or it might be some orthography. So now I will turn to NLP, which is the kind of, so natural language processing, the kind of thing that's in your iPhone if you have one. And I like to talk about, in a somewhat facetious way, what I call Maslov's hierarchy of NLP needs, referring to this idea of Maslov's hierarchy of needs, where first you worry about eating, and then you worry about whether or not you have a home, maybe some of you heard about it. So first you need to worry about whether or not your script is in Unicode. So you're using IPA, no problem if you're using Roman script, no problem, but like Tongut only very recently got in Unicode, and Kitan is not yet in Unicode, so it is an issue for some languages. Then after your script is possible to encode in computers, you need to have some text that are actually encoded. So you can't do anything fancy if all of your texts are still on paper or in museums, you have to have some e-texts. And then the next question is, can you divide words apart from each other? Where in languages like English or most European languages, we put spaces between the words, so they usually come pre-word divided, but for Vietnamese or Thai or Tibetan or Chinese, words are not divided. So it becomes a NLP task to split the words apart from each other. Once you have words, then you can analyze those words, and in particular, you can identify the part of speech category of that word. Yeah, so especially if you think of of of of of disambiguating homophones, part of speech analysis can be part of that. But now we're just sort of adding, you know, more and more rich layers of analysis, but the idea is automatically. So after a part of speech tagging comes lemmatizers, where, for instance, if we have a word like sang at the part of at the part of speech level, it will say sang is a past tense verb. And then at the lemmatizer level, it will say, oh, it's somehow the same word as sing, even though, you know, sing would be present tense. And then once you have that level, you can start doing syntax, whether it's noun phrase, chunking or dependency relationships between verbs and nouns. And after that is fancy stuff that we don't need to worry about. So I just want to to sort of take stock of some things that are available for English and that have become available for to ban. So there's this company that called Lexical Computing that makes some very useful software that until 2022 is free for everyone in EU higher education establishments to use. So you might want to play around with it. And they have corpora of of a bunch of different languages tend to be European ones with more or less detailed annotation. So I'm going to stick with English where we can count on all the bells and whistles. And this is a word sketch that is done totally automatically, where it's looking at the British National Corpus. And the verb is chair. I use this verb because because it's good for demonstrating the need for part of speech tagging because there's also a noun chair that's a little bit more famous than the verb chair. So once we've if we're interested in the verb chair, we've already part of speech tagged so we can we can find the verb chair. And then we look at this sketch where it's looking at the whole corpus and then automatically telling us typical objects, typical subjects, and typical, you know, other other grammatical interactions with this verb chair. And I think it's pretty impressive already you get people basically people's names and and job titles, or what chair things, and the things that get chaired are subcommittees, meetings, committees, seminars. So there's a lot of semantics of a lexicographical kind captured by this sketch that's all been done totally automatically, right? The grammatical relations come from the corpus, the statistics come from the corpus. Even a little bit more impressive I think is this, which is the thesaurus function, where looking at those statistical relationships of grammatical use, like what are what are other things that people do to subcommittees is kind of the way to think about it. It ranks the statistical similarity between chair as a verb and other verbs and you get convene, attend, host, conclude, adjourn, organize. And I think this is really impressive because it really is approximating semantic similarity, which is which is a notoriously hard thing to define and model, and has done it by this series of grammatical and syntactic analyses then scaled over a large corpus. So these screenshots actually I think I probably took back in 2013. So you know this stuff in language like English, totally old hat. It was done a million years ago. But a language like Tibetan, we had a project at SOAS from like 2012 to 2015. And for Tibetan these these things didn't exist. So we were mostly working on part of speech tagging and word breaking, and we did a pretty good job of that. And here is the Tibetan word galpo, which means king. And from a word sketch, these are these are verbs that king tends to be the subject of or let's we say the agent because it's an errative language. And it's a little small and probably most of you can't read to Ben anyhow, but they turn out to be speech verbs largely. So they're their request, say, another verb for request, another verb for for request or say, so lots of speech words. But then there's also some other ones, think, give. And then there's a verb that is used in a as a light verb construction in in in, you know, in a construction that means invite. So these are, you know, not shocking things to see kings involved in. But I think it's, I don't know, I think it's cool and very useful if you were, for example, running a Tibetan dictionary. Now, when we turn to the thesaurus function, it's a little less impressive. And I think the reason why is because of the corpus size. So this corpus is 80 million words, which may sound like a lot, but is nothing compared to what they have on English. And we have a more recent Tibetan corpus that's about 150 million words. So I'm hopeful that once that's loaded in, we'll get more impressive results here. But this is what the system says are the nouns that behave most similar to king. And I'll just tell you what they are. The top one means God. The second one means Lama or Guru. Yeah. So not so bad. You have sort of high ranking, socially high ranking, animate, you know, entities. But then comes son or boy. And then person, which I think, well, you know, kind of a king is a type of person, but not stunningly impressive. And then the last one that's on the screen, it means a victor. And that is is quite good, I think compared to, you know, a victor and a king are sort of semantically similar. So, you know, for the purposes of this presentation, it's just to say, we have made substantial progress down the road of Tibetan NLP. And that work continues. But it needs to be done for each language on earth, right? And if the language has fewer resources than Tibetan, then you have to start from wherever that language is. And that might be automatic speech recognition. So after this project ending in 2015, I was busy with my ERC grant. And I wasn't involved in the follow-up project. But there was a follow-up project on verb syntax, looking at classifying Tibetan verbs according to their governance relationships. And this is a screenshot from the corpus that that project has delivered, showing, and I think, personally, it is a very beautiful interface. Yeah, so you see, I'll just talk to you a little bit about it. Like the D is a demonstrative, the C is a case marker, the A is an adjective. Then we have another case marker, then a noun, then a determiner, and then the verb. And there's an arrow that goes from the verb to the head of the noun phrases that it's governing. And in this case, we have a sentence that says, there they erected each a statue of the great black one. So, dare is the first syllable at that place, and then knock-bow, black, chimp-bow, great, genitive of ku means body, actually, but here it means statue, re-each, and then zheng means to set up. So, I mean, and I don't want to sort of, let's say, lead you to the impression that any of this is particularly easy. It takes a lot of work, a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, and also a lot of analytical work. But once it's up and running, it's scalable is the point, right? Because like now we have a machine that will analyze Tibetan syntax, and it doesn't care how much Tibetan you throw at it. So, we can go, we can get big data sets that we can use in our research.


What's going on guys it's your boy the BJ here today with another destiny video and in today's video we have top five trials of a Cyrus plays of the week some epic clutches in this episode so I hope you guys enjoy that if you do if you could leave a like I would appreciate that support but guys enjoy the video and I'll catch you on that next one


Yep. Check that. This is Watch Me Work where we're going to spend time talking with you about your work or more specifically your creative process. I'm SLP. We've been doing this show for like 15 years. We started in the lobby of the Public Theater and since COVID we've been online for a while. We were five days a week during COVID lockdown. Now we're back to Mondays, which is the perfect time. Mondays at five where we meet as often as we can to talk with you about your creative process. What we do is we work together for 20 minutes. We each do our own thing for 20 minutes and the prompt is sit down and do some work and then you can ask me questions about your creative process and know that sometimes when you have a question specifically about your process it is so helpful to someone else who is not asking the question. So Lolly is going to tell us how to get in touch. Should you need to ask a question after the 20 minutes work time go Lolly? If you're in the Zoom with us you can ask us questions by clicking on the raise your hand button which should be in the reactions tab likely at the bottom of your screen. So if you have any trouble finding it you can just send me a message in the chat and I'll help you out and if you're watching via live stream on HowlRound feel free to send us your questions via the public theaters Twitter or Instagram accounts or via Watch Me Works Twitter account which is at Watch Me Work SLP with the hashtag HowlRound that's hashtag H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D. Awesome sauce and yeah before we get started working I think I'm just going to thank the public theater and HowlRound and specifically Lolly Pizarro for helping us get this thing off the ground every time we come around. So how about that so here we go we've got 20 minutes I uh oh my thing I'm doing is over there so I'm gonna get up and walk away and come right back okay here we go and that is time it is time it is time so now uh for the whoops for the remainder of the time until six o'clock until the hour we will uh talk about your creative process should you have any questions. All right looks like we already have a question from Laura you should be able to unmute now. Hey how are you? Hi, how are you? Good to see you. Nice seeing you congratulations on you the nominations of your actors. Yay right? Definitely love that happens loving that happens. That's great okay here is my problem I you know I'm still doing stand-up so and I'm um and my topic is race that's what you know I've been telling you that and I I because of Yuri Kochiyama she is in she was able to do speeches and stuff I can't do that the only way anybody will listen to me is if I make them laugh yeah great so I I started with a teacher in Connecticut and maybe I took her classes too long because she was great when I wrote the material and read it out loud to everybody she was always this laughter that you knew what to keep in what to edit out uh so now I'm just finding now that I'm in the city it's a little bit hard I'm I'm not finding it's I have the people but I'm it's it doesn't feel the same you know I guess I was so used to that teacher I don't know how to move on to be still funny or make it funny or whatever to write material or whatever right right right so you need a new sounds like you need a new sounding board or I mean I guess I'm it sounds like your teacher in Connecticut is no longer available you say you took her class no I don't yeah I don't want to do that go back great great great so you need a new group or a new person right a preferably a group because you know I mean you want to try it out on I mean I I mean I I don't know anything about stand-up comedy except what I've watched you know and having been on stage myself and told said things that people find funny you know I just take that as kind of a it helps to have more than one person right so you need kind of a way to try out your material yeah I have that okay actually and I even have it with my old people but I guess it wasn't like they didn't they don't really know how to do it like my teacher did you know what I mean it's like it's a group together and they they do give good criticism and critiques but I just don't find it as helpful as with her I don't know right so but it's tricky because you're saying you know you kind of you know going in both directions you're saying you don't want to go back to your teacher and yet the people you're finding or the people you have or the people you're finding who are new can't quite give the great feedback that your teacher could give either you know you have to keep looking for people to try the material out on and learn how to I mean ultimately hopefully you would learn how to give yourself that kind of feedback that you were getting from your wonderful teacher you know you want to sort of develop that skill and I think you develop it by going out there in you know I'm trying your material out are there I mean are there like uh you know comedy clubs or stuff have those sort of open mic nights I mean I have a place there I have a place that I'm there and I love it the comic strip live and I could go there any time and it's great so and I have like my little mentor she's 88 years old she's the booker she is 48 and she's Jewish and when she met me she totally got me because you know I'm the midget Chinese that sounds like a Jew you know that's great but tell me Salura I don't get it what are you not getting I mean it sounds like you don't know huh I don't know I don't got a great venue a wonderful mentor who gets you a great sort of place to go where you can try out your material live you just need to what go out there more often you know no I think it's just actually like I've been just running my stuff that I have now you know the the five minute that I that is good but I'm scared to do new material and write it and that's what I am like oh well then you need to you need to go ahead out there and go to your audience okay this is new material I'm scared to do new material do some of your old material the stuff that you know works or gets the laugh so the reaction that you want and then tell like maybe two new jokes you know what I mean you know if you like two minutes of new material if you have a five minute slot I don't know how long the slots are five minutes if you have a five-minute slot do two minutes of old material that works and then three minutes of new material or three minutes of new old material three minutes of old material that works and then two minutes of new material. Okay. Okay. To put your toe in the water a little bit.  Okay. Thank you. Yay. Thank you. Great question. Thanks. Thank you, Lara. Looks like MC has a question. You should be able to unmute. I just wanted to tell you guys I'm so happy to see you and really missed you guys. So it's wonderful to see you all and you know. Thank you. What did you usually have the Golden Gate in the background? Yeah, I switched the Golden Gate around then I tried the Caribbean and now I'm just like blurry, which is you know my state of mind because I'm working on an unreliable narrator. So oh, very interesting. And I'm trying new stuff and I love what you just told Laura so that when I present some new stuff, I'm just going to say it like that instead of being apprehensive, which I will be or not doing it. I'll just say this is new stuff. This is new stuff. Right. This is new stuff and and if people are are welcoming of your new stuff, good. That's how they should be. You know, if for some reason, you know, one person in the group is mean or whatever, they don't know.  They're not they're not your people.  So yeah, but by saying this is new stuff. That's a great way to preface it. You know, I love that. And yes, like you said years ago, keep adding to your pile. So it's a good pile. So yeah, you adding to your pile. That's right. Yeah, adding to it. Keep, keep, you know, keep making your stuff, you know, but it's wonderful to see you all. So thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. I'm sitting. Oh, looks like we have a question from Immanuel. You should be able to unmute now. Hi. Hi. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Okay. Um, I'm very happy to be back. So thank you very much. This is very heartwarming. Yep. And it feels like a constant that keeps the motivation going. So thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah. So my question is, so I'm writing this musical, and I'm realizing my pro process or whatever that means more and more is that my brain is absolutely not linear. So it goes in all different directions. And I feel now that I need to just write down whatever is coming into my brain as it comes and not try and write a scene or write a character description because I'll start writing in character description. There's something else will pop in and then I'm going to write that down. I've also noticed that handwriting is the best for me. Great. So my question is that I find it very difficult to know number one how to organize myself. Right. And number two, how to know when to stop because it just never stops. Like the possibility of developing and like the ideas just keep coming. But at one point, just need to sit down and write the thing because it'll just take, you know, everything is expandable to infinity. So it's, you know, those two things how to organize the thoughts and how to know when to kind of put a cap on the development, I guess. Right. Right. Okay. Well, how to organize it. So you're writing you're writing you like writing by hand. Yes. And what do you write by hand on what? In a notebook. Great. Okay. Great. Okay. So yeah, that's it's kind of it's a great question because perhaps you can if you want, you can keep writing your notebook if you like that. You can also switch to and I'm looking around to see if I have any. I don't know. I'll just use this as an example. Index cards. This looks a lot bigger than the one I have in mind. Right. Three by five index card. Right. You like that. You know, right. Yeah. That way, you can write down your ideas as they come to you and organize them later. Right.  Right. Sure. Yeah. Okay. So that's one thing you can do. That would be super helpful if you write down even you can you can take everything you've written down so far in your notebook and transfer to index cards and put basically one idea on an index card. You don't want to get to, you know, detail, you know, try to capture one idea on an index card. And they can be in any order you want.   What's the end? What's the last thing I want to see? Is it a, it's a musical, right? What's the last thing I want to see? Just pretend you know. Great. That's what we call the end. And that's the end. So you write that down on a card. That's the end. So then you put that's the last card. And then you kind of organize them like to accumulate toward that last card. You know, sure. You know, because you the development process, it can expand to infinity.  I'm done with that. I want to do this one. I've written a lot of things. And I don't go back and like rewriting stuff. I'm done, you know, I'm good. We're good. I'm on to the next thing. So you can say, you know, I'm good for now. I have enough of these cards, enough of these note cards, and I have an order for the story. Now, when you get in rehearsal, of course, and on all that, you'll know that the development process will continue. Okay. So it's not that you after you say I'm done coming up with ideas for now. Now I'm ready to write. That doesn't mean that you're not allowed to come think of anything new after that. You're, of course, you're allowed. It's called rewriting and the development process. That's a really beautiful part of rehearsal. Once you involve actors and a director and designers and producers and all that kind of stuff, right? That it's going to keep growing, but you want to get to the point, some kind of point where you can go, I'm ready to write now. I know the story. The story is, oh, all these things happen and that happens at the end. Okay. So yeah, just know that there is an end point. There are many end points along the way. There's an end point to you coming up with ideas. There's an end point to research pause. It's not a hard stop. It's just a gentle pause where you're able to collect your thoughts.  I'm going to drive to upstate New York and stop in the Catskills pause. Take a bathroom break. Have lunch. Then I'm going to get back in the car and we're going to go further north or whatever. You see what I mean? Sure. Does that help? Because saying there's no end is kind of, it feels overwhelming. Kind of. It does. Yes. Yes, because of everything like developing the character and then what about these possible interactions and then, yes, the story is in. Yeah. It does feel infinite, but that's very calming to know. Just write a beginning, middle, end, and then. Sure. Yeah. Like, pretend you know. It doesn't have to be the perfect one. It just has to be good enough to get you started, you know? Sure. Okay. You know? And as a practice, let's all work on or continue to work on telling ourselves the narrative that helps us get through the day. You know what I'm saying? Because there are many narratives out there and a lot of the narratives that people want to emesh us in are designed to help us like feel like, I don't know. Oh, right? I mean, that's part of the programming plan to make you feel shitty. You know? So you, I mean, I'm not saying put your head in the sand and pretend that things aren't happening, but I'm saying just we'll continually work on framing things in such a way that we're framing it in a way that will help us get through the day. You know? That's kind of a mental trick. For example, you're going, oh my God, I'm developing ideas. Don't stop. There's no end. You know what? Okay. Okay. How about there is an end point. I decide what the end of the story is. It's my story. I'm telling it. You know what? This is a story that you have control over. Maybe you go on the news and you look at the news and maybe you don't have control over what's going on in Oregon. You know? But you have a certain amount of control about what's going on in your story. This is your story, Emmanuel. Okay? Yes. Okay. Thank you so much. Great question, though. I think that's very helpful to many people. It's helpful to me just to remember, what can I, what are the things that I can do something about and how can I frame the narrative in a way that's helpful to my process instead of unhelpful and disturbing? Yes. Right? Yes. Okay. Good question, though. Thank you for asking. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. It looks like we have Annalise, I think was on deck. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Hey. Hi. Hi. So I'm working on, I've been like chewing on the idea of this play for a while, and it's about museum workers who are organizing. Okay. And I have like, like the last couple of plays I just wrote, I had like a major block, like in the winter when I was pretty depressed. And then I found kind of a way out of it through a lot of like, a lot of free rights and a lot of handwriting. And it was very like serially and like hippie-dippy and like very woo-woo. And this play feels like not that it's totally foreign from that, but it, it's not as, it has a larger structure and like, and it involves other systems and where the other ones were kind of more individualist. And I feel like there are like three kind of ways I'm approaching it of like, I'm familiar with like labor organizing in one sphere of like grad students, but I'm not as familiar with like, what does it mean to be doing that in a museum? And also like, I'm not as familiar with art history. So I'm like, okay, I want to like learn about those things. And I want to be outlining because like I can eat, I can like, I can picture like how these events, like, like it feels like there's a lot of nitty gritty to defining like how the strike in this story would work. What would need to, what would need to happen. I feel like there are a lot more cases in this play where an audience would be like, I don't believe that. And, but I want to remain kind of open to the sort of like, free writing, like a lot of like handwriting sort of thing. And I've had trouble being like, okay, I have a feeling I have to do, like, I have to do some of these, like I can do them sequentially, or like, I can do a bit of each, but I'm having trouble being like, which hand do I put in which bucket first? Right, right, right. Okay, that's great. That's great.  Remind yourself of that, you know, you know, sometimes if I, when I have difficulty, I know how to get through it.  Those hippies, those are some smart motherfuckers, man, right. They got through a lot of shit, and they've given us a lot of tools as, as a lot of people who were like, you know, back in the way back, right. They came up with some tools. So definitely very, very smart. Okay, so I, I wonder, would it help to divide your like, how long is your writing, how long every day can you spend writing? I have a lot of time now. I'm trying to, I've become really disciplined with like morning pages, but and I'm working on getting more disciplined with like, then setting aside time for like, writing for specific place. So right now I'm trying to hit like, at least an hour a day. Okay, an hour a day, great, which includes the pages you're writing in the morning or not. Different, separate. An hour a day, great. Okay, so if you did like 30 minutes, like half and half, havesies, could you do your morning pages, then you do 30 minutes of research, set your timer, you know, hopefully you have a timer that's not your phone. But if you don't, that's okay, just use your phone, set a timer, 30 minutes or maybe 25 minutes of research, then you give yourself five minutes to like, stop and pick up the next task, which is 25 minutes of writing or outlining, right? Okay, or free writing or whatever you, whatever you want, writing. If you want to outline, great. If you want to free write, great. If you want to free write about a character, great. If you want to think about character development or whatever you want to do. And so you're spending your writing time, you're dividing it in half. Okay, and that extra five minutes on either side is between the, the research and the outlining, you know, you can sort of chill and sort of gradually, you know, get into the next phase of your writing. And then the last five minutes, you can maybe look over some stuff and think about what you're going to do tomorrow, the next day, you know, is that helpful kind of do both, do both, do both. No, that's super helpful. Thank you. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Just do both. You just, obviously you don't do them at the same time. You do them one, you do one, and then you do another one. And then every day you've done a little bit along the way, right? Right? Oh, cool. That's great. Great. How fun. Great. Sounds like a great project. Good luck with it, Jeff. Thank you, Annalise. Next up we have Ben. Hey, Ben. How you doing, bro? Hey, how are you? How are you? Um, so I was actually initially nervous to ask this question. I was like, I'm not going to ask it.  And I was like, okay, wait, this sounds like a safe space to be able to ask this question. Um, so one thing that I've been finding, you know, in my creative process, because I'm working on a couple of different things, is that when I actually consume cannabis, which I mean, I just started using in the quarantine part of the pandemic to help manage anxiety, I never used it. And it literally got to a point where I was like, well, if I'm going to die of COVID, I at least want to see what it's like to be high. But through using edibles, I then learned that I had been dealing with anxiety my whole life, and it was actually helping me to experience life as a normal person who don't have anxiety. So connecting it to like being a writer, it feels like, like I have, you know, all of my stories and my ideas, but I found like when I've used an edible, like things flow so freely, even to the point where now I make sure I have my phone near me when I get high, because like, I'm able to hear the endings of plays, I'm able to hear like, you know, a new musical number and stuff like that. And so, and I've even been, I've learned enough about how to microdose a particular brand to be able to have a writing session. What I guess I'm nervous now is, is this going to be the only way I'm able to write things? Is this going to be the only way I'm able to create? Because I've seen so many creative people, so many comedians, so many actors who may start with something. And then, you know, they unlock their gift and they unlock their funny.  And so I guess I've just been, I'm concerned because right now I see so many, so many cool things developing within my material and things I've shared with, like, oh my God, I love that. And I've been like, oh, I wrote it when I was hot. You know what I'm saying? Like even a song that I wrote, again, on an edible going to buy chili cheese fries was licensed by the US Embassy, the US Department of State to be used as a, as a teaching tool to teach kids English across the world. And I'm just nervous now, like, am I only able to achieve that level of progress from things that I create? I was just curious, like, you know, any opinions or advice that anyone may have, because it's, you know, it's kind of like a, I don't know, it's like, you know, I feel like as creators, we're also kind of connected to something spiritual. And that's where we kind of are able to pull things from and make up these things that already exist. We just kind of like, tell the story of it that's within us. But I'm just nervous that I don't want this to be a crutch for my creativity. Is what I'm asking making sense. Right, right, right, right. No, I hear you, Ben. It's a good question.  And what's, do you live in New York City? No, no, no, I'm in Detroit, Michigan. It's very recreational. It was very legal. Okay, it's legal. Okay, great. So that's great. So no, what's great is you're not breaking the law.   Well, you're doing, you're consuming a legal substance in a quantity that's legal. You know, you could turn it around all the way around or all the way inside out and say that maybe your creativity is a crutch to alleviate your anxiety. You know, I mean, we can find lots and lots of ways to be anxious about things that are going in the way that we want them to go.  Be mindful of that and talk to that, about that with your health professional providers. Yes, I have a therapist, I know that. I'm not looking for that yet. I didn't mean to imply that. I just meant like, I want you to know, it's a concern. It is a real concern. It's great that you're voicing it. I'm thrilled that you're having success in your writing.  So the 10 mile run every day becomes a crutch. You could, you know, right, they have to have their run, or they have to have their coffee, or they have to go walk their dog, or they have to read the news, you know, we all have these things that we do. So I would say that it's a valid concern and just keep an eye on it. You know, I think it's really great that you're keeping an eye on it. Like, hmm, wouldn't want this to become a problem, you know, but just like the person who drinks a glass of Chardonnay. If a year from now they're hitting like two bottles a day, then we're like, you know, keep your eye on it. But keep, I would say continue to use it.  Good for you for finding a way to get to the next day and not hurt anybody along the way. Good for you. Yay, right? Yeah. Thank you. Good for you. Thank you, Ben. Looks like we have a question from Nia. You should be able to unmute. How are you? Good, good. I have a question as it pertains to writing dialogue. Okay.  More specifically, you know, I'm black, I'm from Detroit. And like, how do, like there's just a lingo that we use, but I don't want to write things that are like, that are referencing like black cultures lingo and it sounds in a way that is like trying to explain who we are versus just like writing from the vantage point of like realism, how people actually speak and how they communicate. Right, right, right. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think, I think so, because, you know, we can, we can, you can be very specific about how the community that you want to represent wherever they are, wherever they're from, how folks sound, right? And then are you concerned that what they're saying won't be understood by an audience? I'm not concerned. I just want to make sure that it's like authentic because I've been like really making sure that like, I'm not writing to explain a community. I'm writing to literally reflect and like mirror this community. And I'm in a way I'm also writing for that community. I'm like, I'm not writing to, I hope this makes sense. I'm not writing so that the person that's from outside can like learn more about like this Detroit area, but more so just in a way that really, really, really reflects that area. But I find that in a lot of things that I've read, or things that I've watched on TV that have reflected, you know, Detroit, I feel like the language is just so much more forced and I don't know how to make it natural. Oh, oh.  So I'm actually not a playwright. I write more fiction, but I'm looking to like venture into playwriting. And I think I feel like the dialogue is a part of me that is just like really, really intimidating. Oh, okay. Okay. So you're reflecting your community, you want to be authentic, you know, don't worry about how they sound on TV, because that's a whole, you know, that's a whole another thing. I would just say, you know, know what story you want to tell. You want to tell a story about ABC? Go ahead and tell that story. Write how you think the people would sound. It's kind of sounds simple, but it kind of is that simple, especially if you are from that community. You know, write how people sound if it sounds forced, don't worry about it. That's what rewriting is for.  And a novel, you work with an editor once you have a, in the way I did, you work with an editor once you have a draft, you know, a play, you get actors in the room, you're, and some of them might not be from Detroit, some of them might not understand what you're talking about, you know, but you have to, so you have to be the one who knows what's authentic. And so you're working with those actors to maintain that authenticity of the language of the dialogue that you've written. But it's a living thing, you know, a play is a living thing. It's constantly changing until opening night when it's not, it's set, you know. So I would just go ahead and write a girl, you've written, you've written novels, short stories, that kind of thing, just be clear on what story you want to tell and, and write it. And you know, you'll, you'll rewrite it and you'll get it, but become more authentic as you rewrite it. And more specific. Sure. But good luck with it. It sounds, it's a wonderful thing to be doing. Thank you. Sure. Thank you, Nia. We have about five minutes left if anyone else has a question. All right. It looks like we have a final question from Ben. Hey, Ben. Ben again. Yeah. Well, I guess that was, we were just sitting there. I know this has been something that is being discussed more and more, especially kind of connected to the current writer strike, but I was just curious as it relates to AI and using the, the various like chat box and stuff like that to be able to help with the creative process. I, so I had a friend because I was really anti, you know, initially because I was, it's taking, you know, the, and I was scared of it, but she showed me how to use it to kind of like be more efficient with my time. So where, you know, I now use it to be able to help give me some warm up writing prompts. So that way I'm not sitting there for the first 30 minutes of my writing session trying to think how to start, but I can like get started a little bit. But I know some people are saying you're cheating, you know what I'm saying? Like, or it's coming, you know, to take the jobs out.  So I was just curious about right, right, right, right. No, I think it can be helpful for some people doing some kinds of, of writing, you know, sounds like your friend is real smart and she sounds like she's giving you cool ways to help it, you know, help it help you. A friend of mine was playing around with it and they said, write a, write a scene in the style of Susan Lori Parks. It was hysterical. I was like, ooh, I'm glad I didn't write that. I'm glad I didn't write it. But, you know, so it's kind of funny. I'm like, so what are we, what are we trying to do, you know? I don't know. It makes me wonder what, why write at all? You know, why are we writing? Why do we write? Is it so we can make a product to sell it to make money and win prizes? If so, AI is great.  You know, people use whatever it's called, TurboTax or those fabulous, fabulous, brilliant programs to get your taxes done so you can have more time to binge watch the show that you really want to see. Hooray. You know what I'm saying? Great, use TurboTax and it's accurate. Wow. And why do we write? Why do we create at all? Is it to make a product so that we can sell it so that we can pay the rent sometimes? Or is it to, more importantly, is it to have an opportunity to commune with the spirit? You know what I mean? It's like, it's like kissing. Hurry, I got this new way to kiss. Now I can go on to do something. You know, I mean, what are we doing it for? You know, so I think it's a great tool and like any wonderful tool, it has many awesome uses. And but you have to ask yourself, why am I writing? Why am I creative person? What am I in this business for? You know, and the more you answer that question, then you'll see if that wonderful tool is helpful or not. Are you in a hurry? You know what I'm saying? You know, personally, I find it really interesting and exciting that it can do that. And I find the process of facing my process and wrestling with the angels very interesting. And if it's going to make the wrestling easier, so I don't have to wrestle, cool, cool. But I'm interested in the fact that I got to wrestle with the angels, man. I really appreciate hearing you call it that wrestling with the angels because I kind of like say something similar like that.  I mean, that's the thing. At the end of the day, we each have our reasons why we do this, you know, and maybe there are different reasons on different days.  Oh my gosh, you're cheating. You know, these, these tools are the modern or the, these, these days are incredibly helpful. And we ask ourselves, so why am I do, why do I do this and not, why am I, why am I doing this and not something else, you know, you know, it's like making music, you know, you can push a button and sound like you can play an instrument or you can actually sit down with your guitar or your violin or your piano keyboard or your voice or whatever, it actually make those sounds, which is, which is, which I think has some importance not to devalue or dismiss those wonderful technical logical advances. It's 602, Paypal. Yes, it is. Thank you so much, Ben, for that question. Thanks for the wonderful questions. See you next time. Lolly, I'll get back to you on the dates. Great. Remember your questions, people, and we'll answer them next time. Yes, we will. Check the websites for future dates coming soon. Thank you. Thank you, Lolly. Thanks, folks. Okay.


I think that's how it sounds. Okay, you'll never guess what. We have bigotry in America. We have Peter Haffenberg. You can talk to us about it. He's a history professor. So watch out! Good morning, people. Good morning. Good to see you again, Jay. So let's talk about anti-Semitism today, because it keeps rearing its head. And we live in a time when perhaps there's more than when you and I grew up. We live in a time, you know, perhaps when the late part of the 20th century really was improving. It was better. And, you know, a Jewish person could feel that this was a welcoming country. Maybe most of the 20th century, it was always getting better. And now it's getting worse. Do you agree? Yes and no. So you told people to be warned as a history professor that this hand on the other hand or an economist with three hands would be much easier. The statistics, so let me address what you said immediately. The statistics show a spike in what would be defined as anti-Semitic attacks. And I do not mean that in a snarky way at all, but we want to look at how things are defined. So, officially, and probably still the most accurate chronicler is the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League. And their report from last year, which includes the United States. So they're not, they don't include Canada, for example, or Europe. They have different statistics for those. We need to talk about that too though. Right, right. And there have been Canadian incidents, but they generally look at the United States, I assume the District of Columbia, and they show a spike in what they consider to be anti-Semitic events or experiences. So for example, spray painting of swastika, an attack on somebody who is Jewish even though the person or person's attacking may not necessarily refer to that person as being Jewish. There could be other reasons. So that's why I'm saying, again, not in a snarky way, we want to kind of unpack. And certainly, the impression is, and is very accurate, that the most horrific attack on American soil against Jews occurred Pittsburgh last year, that's still this year, I apologize, still this year. So all of those would paint a picture that Jews are less secure in public than they were before. And that's certainly fueling a sentiment that Jews are vulnerable. My response would be, and it's not to disagree, but I put it in a complimentary mode or genre, all such attacks are more common these days, blatant attacks against people of color, blatant attacks against transsexuals. So one response is not just that Jews are attacked and that there's anti-Semitism, that the idea of a liberal open society is under attack. And that Jews are the canary in the mine for some people, that it's a sign that the notions of tolerance, we don't all have to like each other, but getting along, it's living here in Hawaii for example, there's no place to go, you better get along, you're not going to pick up your car and drive across the border. So I would agree that the impression is, and certainly the impression is, that attacks based on some kind of difference are also greater. Now if we look historically and geopolitically, I think we could agree that Jews in general in the United States are more comfortable and safer than in most of Europe. Certainly there's been a lot of press about attacks in France and comments we could talk about if you wanted to have the Labour Party in Britain. So vis-a-vis other significant Jewish communities, the community of France is large, the community in England has been there ever since, Pram will invite them back in the 17th century. So we're talking about significant Jewish communities. My other point would be, and again I don't mean this to be trite, but if we look at the entire history of Jews, particularly Jews in diaspora, so Jews have always lived in what is now Israel, they've always lived there, but a majority of course for many years lived outside of what is now Israel. These are probably still the best of times and it's probably still the best country in which to live in. And I do not mean that in a banal or superficial way, but the average Jew living here as a Jew is still far better off. What about Canada? So Canada I think is a really interesting case because Canada is a relatively open society diverse, exactly, and the diversity is different than the United States, it's actually closer to the British model. And what I mean by that is if we took say two of the most significant Supreme Court cases about diversity, place E.V. Ferguson and Brown versus Board of Education, there are societies that think separate and equal is the way to go. And it's a certain degree Canada, ever since the British in the 18th century, said French Canadians can keep their language and keep their Catholicism, they have sort of had the British model. They're communities, they should get the same public support, they should be protected by the same laws, but if there isn't the pull or push of assimilation, that is, and I hope listeners will call and correct me, that's kind of a, and we're very aware about using the term exceptionalism, even if it has failed in many cases, that has at least been part of the mythology, the powerful mythology, and good or bad, I don't mean mythology in a dismissive way, I mean ideas which could motivate us to be better, and obviously ideas which could motivate us are worse. But if you look at the history of Britain, I mean one of the reasons Britain is having difficulties is that for years communities were separate, Islamic schools had public funding, and there wasn't really an attempt to assimilate, and I think Canada is more in that condition. And so attacks on Jews in Canada historically have been, again far fewer than Europe, but there have been some interesting moments of anti-Semitism. And again I want to be very careful here because historians are always wary of over generalizing, so big G goes up, not to over generalize, but there have been some historical problems in Quebec and Montreal. I mean with the Jews or with the French? With the French and the French Catholics, Mordecai Rikler, the great Jewish novelist, wrote about this for years and years and years, and Mordecai Rikler actually opposed the referendum to separate Quebec every 10 years or so, there's talk about that. And one of the reasons he said is that Quebecois are by nature essentially anti-Semitic. So there has been, now that's Mordecai Rikler, who was never subtle about even a tsunami, so I don't think that, I would not take that as historical fact, I would take that as an impression about a kid who grew up there, was very perceptive, had a little edge to him if you ever look at Mordecai Rikler, but there were plenty of examples of that, and there still are today in Montreal. I think throughout parts of Canada there's a more traditional British anti-Semitism, which is really a quieter one, it's the comments made at the dinner table, or not being allowed to join certain clubs, but I would be very surprised if a march like Charlottesville occurred in Canada, I'd be very surprised. I don't know quite as much about out west, but certainly one here's very little about anti-Semitism in British Columbia, one here's very little. They're not a lot of Jews in that big swath of Alberta and Cowboy Canada, but you just don't hear. There's great diversity there. There seems to be a great amount of tolerance. I think in general if one stuck a thermometer, a tolerant society, thermometer in a society, I think you'd find that Canada, and one of the answers, and again I don't mean to be quipish about this, is Canada has never felt the burden to be a world power. It has never felt the burden that the eyes of the world are upon it. I think there are a lot of reasons that Canadians have kind of settled into, it's still relatively loyal to England, and there are many reasons that liberalism and tolerance there are much more the British model. It is also, of course, let's remember where the Underground Railroad ended, when American slaves, African-American slaves. Sure, in Vietnam, and this is not a racist issue, but in Vietnam you wanted to escape the U.S. right there. But he himself is a haven. Right, and I think part of that is you don't find Canada trying to police the world, you don't find Canada trying to determine other people's policies, but we see they also, because of that, can't always go it alone, so Canada has to nudge up a little bit to the U.S. Yeah, and they see themselves in the shadow of the U.S., so whatever happens in Canada, there's always a feedback kind of relationship with the U.S., but you know what, back to the U.S. for a moment, it strikes me that you say the ADL keeps the statistics on certain kinds of visible anti-semitic events. Right, also just to add a little sense, sorry to interrupt you, but also invisible in that they also track online. Sorry, so they track online anti-semitism. I'm not sure I know what that is, but what is the individual event that they track online? So one of the things they track is hate. So they track the hate sites that are explicitly about anti-semitism. Usually those that are about anti-semitism are also racist. They also tend to be extremely anti-women, extremely. So they track, it's not just activities in the streets, but they try to track hate groups, and those hate groups often communicate via online. Sorry for interrupting. No, there's two questions. They have a pretty big scope. Two questions that come out of what you say that I think we should explore, and I'll tell you what I think those two questions are. One is, is there a kind of pinnacle here where you have this kind of low-level hate, dinner table, exclusionary type things?  Oh, is there a pyramid? That's my first question. And I guess my second question is, you know, how does it work? What is that social and mental problem? Because this is not just one person or even a community. This is all over the place, and it's been all over the place for a couple thousand years, at least. So I wanted to ask you about both. Let's go to the first question first. Those are two important questions. They're related, but not, I mean, not directly. So I'm gonna play the fifth a bit about that and rely more on scholars in communications and hate, etc. But I would say as a historian, what we've seen happen is, particularly with social media as part of that pinnacle, less reluctance to express what would have just been the dinner table now, publicly. The anonymity of it. Right. It allows one to, for example, I had a discussion with a group at Temple of Manuel. I mean, it sort of boggles the mind that an ISIS sympathizer, you know, in Paris can email and agree with a white supremacist in Idaho. But in general, they would not. And in general, you would not see them at the same March. If they were, you know, earlier during our time, they probably would not subscribe to the same newspaper. But you're absolutely right. The anonymity or the strength of the ideological connection transcend. Now, is there, there's not a seamless connection to sort of give a kindergarten Freud, right? The anti-Semitism and the racial hatred is somewhere in our head. It's some kind of animal response, fear, jealousy, disaffection, tribalism, something like that. But as a rudimentary Freudian, there's also the ego which allows you and tells you that's just not proper behavior. That seems to be gone, but fair. That seems to be gone. So in that pinnacle, the kind of editing, but Freud would have said it's self-editing. You got to, for example, you pull up to the stop sign and nobody's there. But you know you're supposed to stop. And that's how society stays together that you stop. Or in Conrad's hard darkness that society stays together because we agree that it's necessary to lie. It just is necessary. There's certain things. And those are all self-conscious though, right? But what's happened to me, and again, it's very rudimentary view of mine. And I'm sure many of your viewers and listeners will be able to correct me. The kind of self-checking is gone. And that's gone on a lot of things. And that's sort of the, that's where you could get from the let's have a conversation around the dinner table to I'm going to express it to my friends at school or I'm going to go join a group. There doesn't seem to be any editing. I mean, as a historian, we're not going to get rid of hate. We're not going to get rid of intolerance. The point is though, a society can't function if those things are publicly expressed or they're institutionalized or major political leaders, you know, exploit them. You can't, you can't help what happens. Everybody says it's a sign curve, right? There's some periods of time, the Enlightenment, for example, where there's less hate and more collaboration and you don't find that. And I submit to you and I'm interested in your reaction. There's two factors working. One is a cultural factor. So if I grow up in a household where I'm inclined to be, you know, a little wild and unstructured and have those primeval thoughts and, you know, and indiscretions, you're it. My mother says to me, Jay, don't do that. And she inculcates that in me as a child. I'm less likely to entertain those thoughts. You know, let's have a real problem with my mother. I am less likely to, you know, do that when I'm an adult. I'm not going to participate in that because it's built in because, you know, mammals, we get things built in in our childhood and they last with our whole life. The other factor I'd like you to address in this discussion, this particular point, is leadership. And we can talk about American leadership. We should talk about that.  I really mean it. And if you fight, you know, I'm putting a lid on this. If you fight, you know, the Muslims and the Christians, whatever it was, and the Serbs and Croats, particularly, and all that, if you fight, I'm going to punish you for that. I'm your leader and I mean it. So don't fight.  You are not permitted. The rules are being established and you cannot break them or else. There's a sanction involved there implicitly. Okay, so how do those two factors work, do you think? And how are they working now? Well, I think they work in a couple of different ways. It's a very important point. I mean, the easy answer is, do we have leaders of particularly democracies who are attempting to, I think unity is not a very helpful word because we're a diverse society. And we should be a diverse society and that's healthy. But public acceptance, public tolerance, public decency, those things that make for a civilization, and that's not racial, Western or non-Western. I mean, it's just simply the ability to have society function in a way which is not anarchistic and is not totalitarian. Right. And I think particularly, it sets a tone. It's a little bit like, say, the President of the United States and the economy. Really, the economy is going to function and presidents get too much blame and too much applause and credit. But they do set kind of a tone. And so certainly, in a society where there are means of communications and societies which in one way or another pay attention to what the leadership says, certainly. And I don't think we need to point any fingers because it seems to be there's a very strong revival of ethno-nationalism almost around the world, almost regardless of whether it's a republic, a dictatorship, a democracy, etc. It's not my imagination. This is happening around the world. And I think a general consensus and happening in large democracies, India, happening in very large democracies, that's an ethno-nationalist movement, which is historically violently anti-Muslim as well as others, the Hindu nationalist movement. I mean, Gandhi and Nehru would be quite surprised. Is it a coincidence, Peter, that it's happening in so many countries at the same time? Or is there some kind of connection with our global connection? I would say it here again. I want to be very careful. I want to be careful with everything, but sometimes we can be a little more loosely. The perceived causes are in common. And I mean, that may not be the precise causes, but what we perceive and talk about at least, which is important at one level. So if you look at the various countries, they all have an ambivalent relationship with globalization. People are taking our job. People particularly of another nation or another color are taking our jobs. And that's pretty, pretty consistent. Each of them has reached a point in their history where they're very self-consciously erasing and rewriting the past. In general, along some kind of ethnic line. So for example, in India, many of the, we use the word traditional, Gandhi is that kind of carefully, but the Mughals arrived in the Middle Ages, right? So there was not a Islamic India before, and the Mughals ruled really until around, you could say, oh, middle 19th century.  So at least until around 1800, probably, they ruled. So what's happening though in many places is the Hindus are renaming places as if the Mughal history never happened. And we see that when the Egyptians erased Moses' name, he didn't exist. And one of the most brilliant moves politically of another generation, Nelson Mandela, as the first democratically elected leader of South Africa, the Republic of South Africa, went to the single most important Afrikaner site. It's the Vortrecker Memorial, and specifically said, I'm here. This is part of our history. But it should not be used as a shrine. I mean, I understand why there's concern. I mean, there's concern in the American South and not just American South, because there are lots of statues in the north. I mean, there's concern that, essentially, is not a historical item. It's a shrine. And that may be part of the difficulty. So it's not that it exists or not, or that it was built or not. It's not necessarily what happened back when in the 19th century. It's how you look at it today. Well, you don't want to pull it down because it's part of your past. It is. But we can talk about the Confederate monuments. They're a slightly different case, because the two times in which there was a spike in their building were specifically two times in which the Klan had a spike and coincided in 1920s with very strict American immigration. So unlike in India, where the Mughals inscribed and gave a name to these places when they came, the Civil War memorials are just as much memorials to these two moments in American history as they are even really to the Civil War itself. That's yet another dimension of how you look at these things. And I think that's an important dimension if the monument is used as a shrine. If it's used as a historical marker, then you can do what some countries did, like independent India, the various statues of the British, Queen Victoria, et cetera, and put them in a park. You know what I like talking about?  It's like spelunking. Have you ever gone spelunking?  You just don't do that. Did you do that? Yes, I did. Oh my gosh. It's scary, but I'm going to feed you. So a conversation can be like spelunking. So we're going to come back out now and we're going to talk about anti-Semitism. Okay, so I agree with you, except that I would say we go to a coffee shop. Okay, we decided to go to the next coffee shop in the discussion. Okay, let's talk about Trump. You know, the statistics are not conclusive, but they do suggest, the ADL statistics, they do suggest that Trump has an effect on this whole issue. And I would like to explore with you that effect. You know, he doesn't necessarily, he says, some of my best friends are Jewish. I don't believe that when anybody says that. But, you know, then you find that in fact, he's somehow fomenting it.  How does that work? And how does he do it? And does he understand what he's doing? And what kind of feedback is he getting from people who actually respond to it? That's another coffee shop. That's like the coffee plantation. I never promised you a rose. You did not. I don't really like roses that much. I prefer tulips. All right, let's, where should we start? Because that's a very common discussion. I'm going to start with almost the anti-response, is that we're focusing too much on Trump. Now, having said that, we'll now focus on Trump. Okay, what has been the impact of Trump? Well, I think, again, I'm not an expert in modern American politics. I hope some of my friends will respond. I think that Trump, whether consciously with Bannon or not, is playing the, again, ethno-nationalist part. And anybody who plays the ethno-nationalist part, regardless of where they are. I mean, the Han played in China. We've talked about India. Most Europeans are now playing it. The inevitable consequence, even if you intended or not, the inevitable consequence is a resurgence of a hatred which has been there and intolerance and excuse. So whether or not Trump believes it, I look at Trump personally, and again, this has no professional affiliation as a 12-year-old. I mean, he just kind of stopped. I might actually more matured, but that's not fair. He stopped developing. He's a narcissist. Do not continue an argument. I'm going to bomber on. No, I'm not going to bomber on. That is a contrast to Obama, who was criticized for being too thoughtful, asking too many different views. And part of the Trump response, I think, is not just a racial response, which it clearly, clearly is. It's also this idea that experts and conversations and dialogue do not really matter. I know what needs to be done. I have a gut. We're back to the end again. I have a gut idea about what needs to happen. The problem is, if it doesn't happen immediately, then maybe my gut will tell me something else. I think it's a mistake for us to spend too much time blaming Trump, other than, again, setting a tone, which allowed these things, which had been on people's minds. It's not as if suddenly these hate groups arose, but they now live in an environment where they publicly express themselves. That I would fault him. Like I'd fault any. He doesn't condemn these actions, or at least not sufficiently. And part of what's happening is the lack of condemnation is giving racists and anti-Semites. Everybody does everything with impunity these days. Nobody gets.  So you can't do that. Right. So I was going to respond to that because what's coming up against this, and Trump knows it as well, is at least one narrative of freedom, however you define freedom, right? Freedom is states right.  Freedom is to own guns. Freedom is to say what I want on the web. You don't even have to worry about that. There's no tradition of freedom in Yugoslavia, other than freedom from Russia or freedom from the Islamic Empire, but that's a macro. The United States. And so what Trump can fall back on is I'm letting people be free. I'm letting, you know, and I'm letting fetuses be free. I'm letting all these, I'm letting religion be free. And the there's a kernel of truth. But the cob, the cob is big and cobs have lots of kernels. Of course, there's a kernel of truth. Of course, there's a kernel that religious freedom was important, of course, but societies have to measure the relative weight. And so it's religious freedom more important than somebody's safety or is religious freedom more important than the public good, which should transcend that. So whose job is it to correct this? Not only in this country, but elsewhere, not only with Trump, but, you know, with other leaders that do not condemn it. It's our job. We have a ballot box. It's our job. What do we do? What do I do? We're right after this show. Where do I go? What do I say? What do I do?  You get on the social media and be responsible. And instead of so many people running around social media, you know, like termites on meth. I mean, just relax, step back. Termites on. I've been following in your system. I watched a show about AOC. There's nothing. I mean, AOC cannot use underarm deodorant without Pelosi worrying about it or a Chinese daughter saying you're using Chinese underarm deodorant. People really need to just step back a bit. Just a grip. Like the problems are always going to be there. I know that. And there are some significant. There are some major issues. It's just, I feel like, you know, Yates did that. Those who really want to sit down and talk about the issues and try to resolve them are just overwhelmed by people who are loud, running around, parts like you and me. We can't manipulate the technology the way that other people can search for advice. We don't have ready advice, but we can search for advice. To know what's good advice and not. I mean, part of the issue of social media is the same issue John Stuart Mill and others had in the 19th century with an explosion of printed material. Not everything is correct. Not everything is truthful. Not all social media is good. Right. And not all newspapers in the 19th century in England were good, but they're out there. So how do you judge? And that puts an unbelievable burden and an unfair burden on our schools. That's why you and I have to have more conversations. And we need to. We have to explore this unpack it, explore it, discover it one step at a time. You know, make sure the schools are well funded. I know there's a significant interest in STEM and kids going on to the STEM path, which is fine.  So they get an understanding of how of the social context. I mean, when you get on your phone and you get on Facebook, it's not just a technological connection. It's a social and cultural one and historical one, too. Yeah. And the great minds study history, great minds across the world of all genders and orientations. The great minds can help us negotiate that. There are new things, of course, but almost everything new has at least some old advice towards it. Then you will come back. I will come back, of course. Thank you. Of course. But I have to wear this shirt. Of course. And me too. Please do. OK, thank you very much. Thank you, Peter. OK.