Doctor Tyne Daile Sumner, research associate in the field of culture and communication at the University of Melbourne, has written an interesting article summarizing her research project, Literature and the Face: A Critical History. In it she investigates the cultural history of the face and how phrases about faces that we use in common speech and contemporary text today had historic beginnings in written literature.

“Every body was punctual, every body in their best looks:
not a tear, and hardly a long face to be seen.” ~  Emma (1815)

“Jane Austen’s use of ‘long face,’ for example, has a complex semantic and philosophical history where the expression evolved from use in purely descriptive terms to a more complex symbolic term that refers to a person’s overall disposition or mood.

The practice of assessing a person’s character from their outward appearance – especially that of the face – is known as physiognomy, which comes from the Greek terms physis meaning “nature” and gnomon meaning “judge” or “interpreter”.

This concept was developed by German anatomist Franz Joseph Gall (1758 – 1828).

It’s one of many diverse disciplinary fields that intersect with the description of faces in literature and was widely accepted by the Ancient Greeks and during the Middle Ages.”

I do think “facial generalisation” is an interesting topic, how “our interior states can be accurately inferred from external signs,” however, I feel that describing faces and doing so accurately is so innately human that delving into how faces behave changes nothing of our intuitive ability to describe or interpret descriptions of faces in prose. In short, it’s like knowing the difference between a stranger and a friend, we just know. At some point, critiquing the method of why something worked or endures misses the mark. Describing a face may have been enough in the eye of the writer not to care about it any longer to move on to the next sentence. Hardly seems like a job for the sciences when one can just ask the/a writer or a group of writers. A person thinking someone else has a long face doesn’t mean anything except to the person/character having the thought. More of a self-reflective perception, but a cleverly described one at that. Further to that point, people adopting phases out of context is as human as imitation. We repeat things to the point of giving them meaning, and then later think it is somehow profound. But in that, I suppose that is where research projects aim to uncover some truth about why we even try to assess and communicate the people, places, and things around us?

Dr Sumner’s article gets interesting when she draws attention to recognition technology, and its possible inability to reconcile its own discriminatory protocols without human intervention.

“The increasing pervasiveness of artificial intelligence, facial recognition technology and the rise of so-called ‘affect or emotion-recognition tools’ have led experts to question how the field has been so quick to assume a straightforward connection between a person’s emotions and the physical signs expressed on their face.

Affect-recognition tools are currently used in security screening at airports, during recruitment processes, in software designed to detect psychiatric illness and policing programs that claim to predict violence.

So what are these systems based on?

Many emotion-recognition systems, share a similar set of blueprints and founding assumptions. They assume that there is a small number of distinct and universal emotional categories that humans involuntarily reveal on our faces and “that can be detected by machines,” notes Kate Crawford, principal researcher at Microsoft Research and visiting professor at UC Berkley.”

I believe in programmed smart machines, useful tech, but have doubts about truly autonomous artificial intelligence. The human element will always be present and it will always be a puzzling conundrum to research. Literature and storytelling is a tool for our continual growth and understanding, and at the heart of it all, I think Dr Tyne Sumner sums up what it is all about;

“[…] reading literature contributes to our capacity to empathise with and understand other people […]” ~ Dr Tyne Sumner

Read the full article here, or its paper below: (https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-literature-helps-us-interpret-the-human-face)

Literature and the Face: A Critical History is an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Discovery Project led by Professor Stephanie Trigg at the University of Melbourne in collaboration with Dr Joe Hughes and Dr Tyne Sumner, University of Melbourne and Professor Guillemette Bolens at the University of Geneva. (https://face.hypotheses.org/)