5 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2015
    1. In 1952, in Manchester, computing pioneer Christopher Strachey created a love letter generator (Wardrip-Fruin).

      This reminded me of Orwell's "Versificator" in 1984. He writes, "The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound."

      Orwell doesn't seem to hold out much hope for machine generated literature, but I wonder how far off that is from something like Camel Tale that randomly remixes 30 years of Metallica lyrics: http://thefwordsrt.appspot.com/cameltail.html

      And yet, the randomness of Camel Tale is surprisingly compelling.

    2. Google’s Ngram viewer

      Oh man, I could spend hours with this toy from Google, mashing up sociology and literature. I had forgotten about this! https://books.google.com/ngrams

    1. "literary works created with the use of a computer for the electronic medium such that they cannot be experienced in any meaningful way without the mediation of an electronic device"

      I wonder if this includes something like the opera "Death and the Powers" (http://opera.media.mit.edu/projects/deathandthepowers/).

      I first read the book of the opera in Poetry Magazine where the experience was anything but e-lit. Still, the performance includes robot actors, which seems like e-performance or e-theater. Is it worth making a distinction between e-lit and e-theater? Is there such a thing as e-theater?

    1. growing audience that reads

      As someone who works in publishing, I'd be curious to hear more details about the market for e-lit.