Automated text generation is interesting and provocative for folks interested in writing; I am thinking of provocations like the material created for NaNoGenMo; but more often, this sort of text generation appears in shorter forms, often tweets, from “bots.” Mark Sample has written about the power and political potential of such bots.

Whether folks are interested, and how they’re interested, would determine the shape of this session: we could talk about, or compare, people’s favorite existing “bots” (or note some of the challenges and problems with them; my favorite is pentametron), or we could work collectively to develop a bot. I’ll try to have the infrastructure ready so that we could get a basic Twitter bot off the ground and tweeting in the course of a session, if that is something people would be interested in; there’s a lot of unfun fiddly-business when setting up a “twitter” bot (or the mechanics of how to get to a script to run routinely or whatever), which I am happy to talk with folks about, but is way less interesting, than trying to imagine what such a project/device can do.

(For folks with previous bot writing experience, I have never used a Markov chain… but if anyone had such experience, and wanted to share, I would love to learn!)

I propose a network visualization tutorial in Gephi – an open-source, multiplatform software, commonly referred to as Data Photoshop.

Gephi has an intuitive user-friendly interface, which allows to visualize and analyze social networks, biological networks, infrastructures, time series (dynamic graphs), map geotagged data, and much more.

We’ll also look at tools that can help you generate network data for Gephi.

Bring your own dataset or play with the ones available, and take home a cute souvenir like the one below:

Battlefronts_black

I propose a session to talk about the playful aspects of electronic literature and web writing. We’ll see some example projects, explore some tools, and mess with digital text in a variety of ways, thinking about pedagogical and creative uses of text on the web and the tools we have to create, unmake, and distribute them.

Guiding principles:

the web is not read-only

text + interactivity = fun

you don’t need to know how to write a computer program to write a computer program

e-literature = “works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.”

For some background information and a sneak peek at the tools we’ll be using, check out:
reallysystem.org/cny2017