Very few Yugoslavians had access to computers in the early 1980s: they were mostly the preserve of large institutions or companies. Importing home computers like the Commodore 64 was not only expensive, but also legally impossible, thanks to a law that restricted regular citizens from importing individual goods that were worth more than 50 Deutsche Marks (the Commodore 64 cost over 1,000 Deutsche Marks at launch). Even if someone in Yugoslavia could afford the latest home computers, they would have to resort to smuggling. In 1983, engineer Vojislav "Voja" Antonić was becoming more and more frustrated with the senseless Yugoslavian import laws. "We had a public debate with politicians," he says.

Word embeddings are a powerful approach for unsupervised analysis of language. Recently, Rudolph et al. (2016) developed exponential family embeddings, which cast word embeddings in a probabilistic framework. Here, we develop dynamic embeddings, building on exponential family embeddings to capture how the meanings of words change over time. We use dynamic embeddings to analyze three large collections of historical texts: the U.S. Senate speeches from 1858 to 2009, the history of computer science ACM abstracts from 1951 to 2014, and machine learning papers on the Arxiv from 2007 to 2015. We find dynamic embeddings provide better fits than classical embeddings and capture interesting patterns about how language changes.

The cars are old and beat up, there are no timers or cheering crowds, and the California sun is nowhere to be seen. Instead, a brown murkiness hangs over the entire world, lending it an eerie and oppressive quality. This is a driving game inspired, not by long pleasure drives along some Pacific highway, but by a childhood spent living in and eventually fleeing the Soviet bloc. He had come home from kindergarten and asked his mother if she would hang out the Soviet flag for Labour Day – a "tradition" enforced by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. "When she told me she would not, I told her I would have to report that to my kindergarten educators because they asked us to," Švadlena says.