nannon-parrish

What stuck with me about Parrish's talk was the overall theme of the exploration of uncertainty. It's something thats commonly done in science/math areas, yet not so much in the humanities. Parrish gives many options to exploring the unknown, from the most literal way--for example, mapping out semantic space through n-grams, and finding the empty spaces--to more abstract ways, such as creating new words through splicing existing words together and generating new definitions. It was something I thought about a lot as I was working on the book project as well, since I felt pulled towards making something more generative/abstract, yet ultimately made something that explored connections between existing language. These two sides of the spectrum feel like the two types of infinity, one that exists between numbers and goes towards the infinitely small, and the other one that exists towards infinite largeness.