Welcome to Etherpad!

This pad text is synchronized as you type, so that everyone viewing this page sees the same text. This allows you to collaborate seamlessly on documents!

Get involved with Etherpad at http://etherpad.org

• Text generation project

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Algorithm.

• 
  
• This track is co-organised in close collaboration with the Training common sense-project and will partially overlap. ( http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/commonsense )
• Language practices are often ritualistic, what makes them predictable and open for automation. Legal, administrative or political language have magic-like qualities. Their words create realities or make things happening. Do they retain this quality when they get automated and become algorithmically reproducible? What qualitative change undergoes such language practices when automated?
• 
  
• This project is about constructing our own text generators. We look at existing text generators, their code and how language has been modelled in it. An interesting example is the generator of academic computer science articles SCIgen ( http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/) . Another example is the Dada Engine http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/ , used for postmodern articles in http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ and erotic texts in http://xwra y.com/fiftyshades . http://botpoet.com/ shows automated poetry made by a range of text generators. Based on the methods used in these text generators, we will develop our own generators and/or explore their uses. This project allows creative coding, but also people without coding background can participate. E.g. by constructing corpora of texts, drafting templates and text structures for these generators or developing projects with them. And the Dada Engine can be used without knowledge of a programming language.
• 
  
• The text generators can be used directly for lit e rary texts or as a building block for artistic and activist intervention in political, administrative and social practices. From political speech writing, automated filing of all sorts of requests, over automated artistic responses on social media to a qualitative upgrade of the noble art of spamming. When you have to talk as expected and to behave normally, why not let the computer do it for you?

• --

More extensive version:

Language  practices are in a large part ritualistic. That aspect makes them also  predictable and open for automation. An interesting question is what  happens to such language practices when they indeed get automated.  Before they have some magic-like qualities, in the sense that words can  create realities or make things happening. Do they retain this quality  when they become algorithmically reproducible? What qualitative change  undergo such language practices when automated?  

• Does  it become nonsense? Famous is the Sokal-Bricmont article that got  published in an academic journal, but was produced with automated means.  Aim was to show that post-modern language was nonsense, as it was  impossible to discern between meaningful content and nonsense. But  nowadays also articles on computer science or mathematics can get  automatically produced and sometimes get published in academic journals.
• In  fact a lot of legal and administrative language practices are already  automated. E.g. when you buy something on the internet, sign a license  agreement, and so on. The financial markets thrive on automated trade  contracting, like with flash trading. Examples of administrative  practices you can find in all sorts of e-government. So, what happens  when you start to automate your side of the relation and automatically  produce grant and tender applications, make demands for permissions, and  so on?

Ideological language is as well very ritualistic. Alexei Yurchak wrote in Everything was forever, until it was no more : the last Soviet generation  about the production of political speeches, which were constructed from  a set of citations of earlier official texts en developed in a speech  industry of its own. Any meaningful content was avoided in favour of a  hegemony of the form. We can question how far the hegemony of the frame  does create a similar situation in some of our current political speech.  Can we investigate this through automating it? What will an attempt to automate this form of speech learn us about this language practice? And in  reverse, does the normalizing of language allows its automation and  which effect does it have on the language practice itself.  

This  project is about construct ing our own text generator(s). Idea is  to look at several existing text generators, their code and how  language has been modelled in it. An interesting example is the  generator of academic computer science articles SCIgen. On http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ you can try it out, find links to code and to other text generators. An o ther example is the Dada Engine http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/ , used for postmodern articles in http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ and erotic texts in http://xwray.com/fiftyshades . http://botpoet.com/ shows automated poetry made by a range of text generators. Further examples can be found in http://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/ , http://projects.haykranen.nl/markov/ , http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl , https://twitter.com/letkanyefinish , . ..
Based  on the methods used in these text generators and other proposed methods  in literature, we can try to develop our own generators and /or explore  their uses. This project has a strong coding part, but also people  without non-coding background can participate . E.g. by constructing corpora of  texts or drafting templates and text structures for use with these  generators or by developing uses and projects with such text  generators. And it is possible to use the Dada Engine without knowledge of a programming language.  

The  results of experiments in automated text generation are an artistic  research in itself and can raise a lot of questions on the status of  text and language. Further artistic use of text generators can be aimed directly at literary texts (cfr http://botpoet.com) , automated theatre, …  It can also be used as a building block for artistic and activist  intervention in political, administrative and social practices. From  automated filing of all sorts of requests, over automated artistic  responses on social media to a qualitative upgrade of the noble art of  spamming. It can be integrated with other code like for text analysis of  social media to guide responses, text-to-speech for automated speeches, …
These  wider uses are probably too ambitious to develop on Relearn. But more  realistic goals are to develop a simple framework which can be used by a  lot of people, some basic experiments and further develop and share a  lot of ideas for its use .