Invited speakers
Computational Linguistics for Literature
Invited speakers
Genesis Reads Macbeth: The Role of Stories in Human Intelligence
Abstract
I believe that human story competence—understanding, telling, authoring—lies at the center of human intelligence. To better understand that competence, my students and I are building the Genesis story-understanding system, a system that reads 100-sentence stories adapted from sources such as Hansel and Gretel, Crow creation myths, and Shakespeare’s plays. I explain how our work has been guided by computational imperatives and challenged by our determination to model aspects of conceptual understanding, cultural bias, hypothetical reflection, personality modeling, listener-aware telling, on demand authoring, mental illness, and concept-based summary and search. I conclude with speculations on whether Genesis can really understand literature without a body, relating the question to the metaphor of the cave in Plato’s Republic.
A short bio (here is more)
A graduate of MIT, Patrick Winston is Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His Genesis research group focuses on developing a computational account of human intelligence and how it differs from that of other species, with special attention to modeling human story telling and comprehension. Author and editor of numerous books, including Artificial Intelligence, he served as Director of the MIT Artificial intelligence Laboratory (now part of MIT's CSAIL Laboratory) for 25 years. He is now Research Coordinator for the multi-university, multi-disciplinary Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines centered at MIT.
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Loss Pequeño Glazier, State University of New York at Buffalo
"The Not-Moth": Poetic Expression in Array Spaces of Computational Constellation
Abstract
My talk provides an introduction to what I call "array poetics": using computer-generated groupings of natural language strings to explore new resonances of poetic space. To explore this space, I describe "The Not-Moth", my own digital poem written as a response to, and reflection on, Robin Blaser's "The Moth Poem", an early, influential poem in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1960s. I investigate the dynamics, edition particulars, and the poetics of Blaser's original poem sequence. Then I think about how the qualities of this influential early work might be cast using the tools of today's technology – not to re-write the poem, but to respond to it through a computer-media composition reflecting some of its forms and language framings, while adding my own digital insights to the undertaking. To this end, the techniques he explored, innovative at the time, are viewed through my lens of "array poetics", the extension of nuances of textual variance through the computer manipulation of poetic language. In my talk, I give an overview of array poetics, including a non-technical explanation of "strings" (individual lines of natural language poetry), the "array" (groupings of such lines), and their arrangement ("coding") in exploring the possibilities of variant phrasing in expressive electronic language. Looking at the "array", I also suggest the implications of the "space between" strings, in the same way one might glimpse the "space between" lines of printed poetry, but here expanded in nuance through the basic digital frameworks (HTML, CSS, and select open-source tools) available in New Media writing. Ultimately the aim is, through technology – as well despite technology – to produce literary language in New Media in its full richness and expressive depth.
A short bio
Dr. Loss Pequeño Glazier is Director of the Electronic Poetry Center/E-Poetry Festivals and Professor, Department of Media Study, SUNY Buffalo. The EPC is the world's largest digital resource for innovative and digital poetry. Glazier is the author of two books-in-progress as well as Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (Univ. of Alabama Press, 2002), Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm (Salt Publishing, 2003), Small Press: An Annotated Guide (Greenwood, 1992), and hundreds of poems, essays, film, visual art, sound and digital works, as well as projects for dance, music, installations, and performance, including at the Neuberger Museum (SUNY Purchase), Royal Festival Hall (London), Instituto del Libro (La Habana), Guggenheim Museum (New York), UCLA Hammer Museum, Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz (Berlin), University of London, Le Divan du Monde (Paris), Bowery Poetry Club (New York), Brown University, and the Palazzo delle Arti Napoli. Glazier's work in digital writing focuses on code and its discontents, whether in natural language permutation, translation, computer programming, computational linguistics and aesthetic, spatial, and poetics. His author page contains numerous examples of his work.