machine reading

This essay argues that the sensing activities of smart objects and infrastructures for device-to-device communication need to be understood as a fundamental aspect of the rhetorical situation, even in the absence of human agents. Using the concept of exigence, most famously developed by Lloyd Bitzer, this essay analyzes the asymmetrical rhetorical dynamics of human-computer interaction and suggests new rhetorical roles for reading machines. It asserts that rhetorical studies has yet to catch up with electronic literature and other digital art forms when it comes to matters of the interface and the sensorium of the machine. It also claims that the work of Carolyn Miller epitomizes the conservative tendencies of rhetorical study when it comes to ubiquitous computing, even as she acknowledges a desire among some parties to grant smart objects rhetorical agency. Furthermore, when traditionally trained rhetoricians undertake the analysis of new media objects of study, far too much attention is devoted to the screen. In the logic of rhetorical theory, cameras are privileged over scanners, optics are privileged over sensors, and representation is privileged over registration. However, new forms of rhetorical performance by computational components may be going on independent of human-centered display. By interpreting works of electronic literature by Amaranth Borsuk, Caitlin Fisher, and Judd Morrissey, it posits a possible framework of sensing exigence.

This thesis explores how various computer programs
construct poems and addresses the way several critics
respond to these computer generated texts. Surprisingly,
little attention has heretofore been paid to these programs.
Critics who have given the matter attention usually focus on
only one of the myriad programs available, and more often
than not, such scholarship concludes with a disparagement of
all such projects. My work reexamines computer generated
poetry on a larger scale than previously exists, positing
some conclusions about how these texts affect contemporary
theories of authorship and poetic meaning.
My first chapter explicates the historical debate over the
use and limits of technology in the generation of text,
studying similitudes between certain artistic movements and
computer poetry. This historical background reveals that
the concept of mechanically generated text is nothing new.
My second chapter delineates how the two main families of
computer poetry programs actually create these texts.
Computer programs combine existing input text, aleatory
functions, and semantic catalogues, which provides insight
into how humans both create and interact with these
programs. At the same time, this study illustrates the
difficulty in defining the level of intention and influence
by individuals on the textual product, and therefore these
texts challenge our traditional notions of authorship and
the value of poetry. My third and final chapter argues that
contemporary literary theory and poetics creates the
conditions under which computer generated poetry can pose as
a human product. The success of these programs to deceive
readers about the origins of the text becomes clearer with
the results of a survey I conducted in which the respondents
were fooled by the machine more often than not. This
possibility of machine-created text masquerading as human
art threatens many critics, who quickly dismiss the process
and its results as non-poetic, but I conclude that since the
computer complicates foreknowledge of origin in some
contemporary poetic forms, this intrusion by the machine
prompts us to reconsider how we traditionally value and
interpret poetry.

Language is the hidden scaffolding of networks, applications, and web sites. It is minified and monetized in ways that are often occluded from the everyday user’s experience. From their point of view, the interaction is innocuous – language is used for labels and explanations. A few words are typed into an empty field and thousands of related results appear instantly. A simple search, an email to a friend, a unique phrase – all easily logged, monetized, and indexed. This is the world of invisible participation.

Our panel is interested in language on the Internet, how it is created, by whom, where it exists, and how it is used. Three examples: Google reads our emails, garners information from our personal messages and uses that profiling strategy to select “relevant” ads. It then displays those ads on the screen next to the very emails from which the information was initially taken. Facebook and other social media platforms use similar methods of securing and storing data — data that is paradoxically private and public, and all personal. Further, crowd-sourced encyclopedias like Wikipedia are shaping the way we read, learn, and think. Language is what links all of these sites together. All of the sites’ underlying organization and structures have been built to follow the logic we ourselves employ in using language. “Robots” read content, algorithms interpret it and databases memorize it. The impact of this process is no longer confined to the Internet, but has reached beyond it into our everyday lives.

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Guest lecture at Duquesne University.