engine

Seedlings_ is a digital media installation that plants words as seeds and lets them grow using the Datamuse API, a data-driven word-finding engine. It is at once an ambient piece in which words and concepts are dislocated and recontextualized constantly, and a playground for the user to create linguistic immigrants and textual nomads. In Seedlings_, a word can be transplanted into a new context, following pre-coded generative rules that are bundled under the names of plants (ginkgo, dandelion, pine, bamboo, ivy…). These generative rules consist of a series of word-finding queries to the Datamuse API such as: words with a similar meaning, adjectives that are used to describe a noun, words that start and end with specific letters. They are then grouped in modules to represent the visual structure of the corresponding plant and can be constrained with a theme word. A new plant can be grafted on top of the previous plant by switching to a new starting point from the latest generative result. Other than words in monospace font, lines of dashes are the only other visual element in the piece, expressing the minimalist aesthetics in these potentially infinite twodimensional linguistic beings. In distributional semantics, words that are used and occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings. Based on this hypothesis, words are processed by n-grams, represented and manipulated as vectors in contemporary Machine Learning. With the help of algorithms, we can now identify kinships between words (through similarity or frequent consecutive use) in milliseconds. Seedlings_ reconfigures existing technologies and services in Natural Language Processing as the virtual soil to generate alternative linguistic plants: it seeks new poetic combination of words by encouraging unusual flow of words and concepts.

Screen shots

Read more about Seedlings_

By Vian Rasheed, 12 November, 2019

E-locutio: stitching styles and pulling threads in electronic literature

Author

Helen J. Burgess

Publication Type

Conference paper or presentation

Language

English

Year

2019

Presented at Event

Electronic Literature Organization 2019: Peripheries (ELO 2019)

Record Status

Tags

Abstract (in English)

Classical rhetoricians have long known “style” as an integral component of Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric, where it refers to the application of compelling language patterns to achieve specific persuasive purposes: for example, the use of the chiasmus or “cross” (“ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”) as a tool that forces the reader to reflect on relationships between and reversals of concepts. From written style (what rhetoricians call elocutio) to "programming styles,” the application of technique/techne/craft to the expressive media we work in is evident, whether the medium is page, memory core, or cloth. Although we are more accustomed to viewing this process as “poetics,” reframing such activity as the application of style enables us to more fully see the suasive material dimensions of work in different media: asking not “what does this thing say” but “what does this thing do to us.” This paper explores some common stylistic elements that appear among writing, programming, and embroidery. While visual screen analogies are relatively easy to parse (for example, “resolution” in embroidery is a result of thread count--lower count, lower resolution— just as screen-based resolution is determined by pixel count), other stylistic features common to all three media occur more fully under the hood. In the course of the talk I will discuss stylistic activities that seek to optimize limited resources (fiber, memory, narrative), create patterns of expression (knots, loops, repetitions), and build networks and relations between ideas ("threads"). I'll use as my primary example the Knights Tour algorithm, used in electronic literature composition in such tools as Juan Gutierrez’ Literatronic engine, and present electronically embroidered reinterpretations of a Knights Tour storyline.