"Presenting the results of a data search sure to strain the capacities of any computer, Milutis proceeds to give an exceedingly close reading of what he modestly calls 'the fundamental core of all literature.'"
"this is a piece of literary minutiae, which, while straining the capacities of any search engine, has had a profound effect on literary experimentation. . . . "
"In 1968, Marvin Spevack developed the first computer-assisted concordance to Shakespeare, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare. Only then were we able to get a full sense of the statistical array of the bard’s this. But the data, while revealing, is still indiscriminant, conflating artistic uses of this with more utilitarian ones. The human operators of this mainframe—an IBM 7094 that was fed punch cards and recorded on magnetic tape—could have treated the output as mere system noise rather than significant information. But Spevack wanted pure data laid out 'in as direct and uncluttered a manner as possible, and yet as seen from different angles, to avoid editorial tinkering and conjecture.' And so this was not filtered from the results."
As I'm staging my private life, confessing my current state of being through status updates and learning the peculiarities of online friendships, my very existence is being stalked and mapped by invisible algorithms. Facebook, one of the most popular and efficient pieces of social software, is tracking my posts, profiling my likes and dislikes and learning from my idle quizzes. In essence there are two profiles building, the public one I present to my “friends” and the commercial one gathering mass through data mining. Telling fictional and non-fictional anecdotes, my presentation will explore Facebook as an idiosyncratic and disciplining environment. I'll be attempting to illustrate how I train the machine and the machine trains me.