Kent K. Chang¶

Kent K. Chang is a second-year PhD student in the School of Information and Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is advised by Prof. David Bamman, researching in natural language processing and cultural analytics.

@KentKChang Github CV Non-academic stuffkentkc [at] berkeley.edu

Before coming to Berkeley, Kent was a predoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University (Department of Social and Decision Sciences); he holds a BA (English language and literature) from National Taiwan University and an MS (Digital Humanities) from University College London, and is the recipient of Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study.

Photo of Kent K. Chang

Kent’s research uses natural language processing to understand and facilitate the process of meaning-making and social interaction in cultural texts, with particular interests in dialogue and narrative understanding. He looks to improve the performance of NLP methods on domains relevant to inquiry in the humanities and social sciences and to innovate new tasks within NLP that directly speak to the needs of these communities. With an interdisciplinary background, he seeks to leverage NLP as a method for literary, historical, and sociological inquiries, putting into synergy the nuance of critical theory and the affordance of neural-based representation learning.

Recent interests (August 2022–present) \(\in\) \(\mathrm{span}\bigl\{\)[dialogue understanding, self-supervised learning, multimodal NLP] \(^{\top}\), [Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, John Searle] \(^{\top}\), [Oscar Wilde, David Hyde Pierce, Vince Gilligan] \(^{\top}\bigr\}\).

Publications¶

Most projects in progress are not listed here. To learn more, get in touch: kentkc [at] berkeley.edu; @KentKChang.

Kent K. Chang, “The Queer Gap in Cultural Analytics.” Book chapter (peer-reviewed); forthcoming in Debates in Digital Humanities 2023, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein. University of Minnesota Press, 2023. Pre-print available upon request.
Michelle Moravec and Kent K. Chang, “Feminist Bestsellers: A Digital History of 1970s Feminism.” Post45 × Journal of Cultural Analytics (special issue ed. Richard Jean So), April 2021.
Kent K. Chang and Simon DeDeo, “Divergence and the Complexity of Difference in Text and Culture.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, October 2020. https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.17585. PDF Github repo
Kent Chang, Yuerong Hu, Wenyi Shang, Aniruddha Sharma, Shubhangi Singhal, Ted Underwood, Jessica Witte, Peizhen Wu, “Book Reviews and the Consolidation of Genre.” DH2020 conference, July 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/02q2-1v27.

Cameo Appearances¶

Scott Viteri and Simon DeDeo, “Epistemic phase transitions in mathematical proofs.” Cognition Volume 225 (August 2022), 105120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105120.
Anna Shechtman, “Command of Media’s Metaphors.” Critical Inquiry Volume 47, Number 4 (Summer 2021): 644–674. https://doi.org/10.1086/714512.
Anna Shechtman, “The Medium Concept.” Representations (2020) 150 (1): 61–90. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2020.150.1.61.

Current Obsession August 2022–present

Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, Better Call Saul

mike Your son made some mistakes, he fell in with bad people. But he was never like them—not really. He had a good heart. One more thing: you won’t have to worry about the Salamancas. Their day is coming. There will be justice.

manuel Justice?

mike I'm sorry, my Spanish. J . . . justicia. Justice.

manuel What you talk about is not justice. What you talk of is . . . revenge. It never ends.

—VI.ix. “Fun and Games”