computer poetry

CultureNet: A Collection of Digital Curiosities: Electronic Literature Conference

Electronic Literature Conference

Andrew Klobucar and I have just come back from the Electronic Literature Organization
conference in Vancouver WA this past weekend where 120 artists and
scholars met to present and talk about electronic literature. Hosted by

NEGATION RELATED TO ALTERITY IN CYBERSPACE AND MATERIAL LIFE

THAT “there’s no other to cyberspace, no air anywhere”

THAT “the body appears to breath, its organs duplicated everywhere, laminated across the constructed world”

THAT “the invisible as the defined excluded, ‘excluded’ from the field of visibility and ‘defined’ as excluded”

THAT “there’s a mass psychosis underway, as if being offline meant you’re somehow deficient, in education, worldliness, style, income, and geographic location”

the animals already know by instinct we’re not comfortably at home in our translated world. Rilke, Duino Elegies, First Elegy    For a dip in a new streaming digital project, go to Tributaries at TCR.

progress_2 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Fishing for Further SuggestionsCultureNet faculty are always bending the spines of books and scrolling through online publications - new and old - that speak to our shared interest in the ways that technology gets around to shaping us and us technology. A few titles recently traded between CNET faculty include:Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, Steel (1997)Andrew Feenberg's Transforming Technology

For the next few months, we will be publishing small sets of customized vocabularies based on popular news items. The vocabularies will feature a set of new words which (fingers crossed) have never before existed in the common vocabulary known as the English language.

The vocabulary words and accompanying definitions are computer generated using a multi-step definition generator. Output of the generator will be enhanced and tweaked over time as new theories are tested and new ideas come to light. More information on the GTR Dictionary Project can be found here : GTR Dictionary Project.

For the next few months, we will be publishing small sets of customized vocabularies based on popular news items. The vocabularies will feature a set of new words which (fingers crossed) have never before existed in the common vocabulary known as the English language.

The vocabulary words and accompanying definitions are computer generated using a multi-step definition generator. Output of the generator will be enhanced and tweaked over time as new theories are tested and new ideas come to light. More information on the GTR Dictionary Project can be found here : GTR Dictionary Project.

Fun times all around ! Google has finally released "version 1" of their N-gram word data sets through the Linguistic Data Consortium. For $150 US, you too can own the following on a 6 DVD set:

File sizes: approx. 24 GB compressed (gzip'ed) text files



Number of tokens:    1,024,908,267,229
Number of sentences:    95,119,665,584
Number of unigrams:         13,588,391
Number of bigrams:         314,843,401
Number of trigrams:        977,069,902
Number of fourgrams:     1,313,818,354
Number of fivegrams:     1,176,470,663

Over at Jim Carpenter's blog, he has a series building on why aesthetic language generation (ALG) is difficult. There are plenty of discussions on the nature of working with aesthetic text generation systems from a writer/reader perspective, but very little on the challenges and questions raised in the actual construction of these systems (outside of the purely technical discussions within fields like Computational Linguistics). Jim has constructed a large scale electronic text composition system entitled "Erica T. Carter" and knows first hand the issues involved. Anyone interested in this area should keep an eye on his posts.