i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

In Bob’s lecture last Wednesday he talked about the use Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for essay grading. This got me thinking about the ways that we are increasingly using computers for content analysis, which in turn is shaping the content that we create, so that this content can to be more easily “understood” by computers. As Kimra notes in her blog post on LSA, human graders may emphasize structure over content while computers graders may emphasizes vocabulary over structure. As we move toward having LSA graded tests people’s writing will be changed by these considerations.