There Is No William Blake: @autoblake's Algorithmic Condition. Issue 1 (April 2016)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- There Is No William Blake: @autoblake's Algorithmic Condition. Issue 1 (April 2016)
- Main Title:
- There Is No William Blake: @autoblake's Algorithmic Condition
- Authors:
- Whitson, Roger
- Abstract:
- Abstract : This article examines a Twitterbot I created in the summer of 2013 to automatically tweet lines of poetry that mimic the style of William Blake. What does it mean for a tweet to be Blakean? The question recalls Alan Turing's famous test of artificial intelligence: how do we know when a machine exhibits intelligence? I explore Turing's question with specific reference to the temporal structure of algorithmic loops and branches found in Blake's poetry, the Markov-chain structure used to statistically generate natural language, and the auto-generated lines of poetry produced by my Twitter program. My article takes inspiration from Friedrich Kittler's article "There is No Software, " in which he questions what writing means when automatic processes are increasingly mediating communication online. For me, Blake's poetic syntax enables an analogous exploration in the field of Romantic literary studies: namely how we can understand the meaning of poetry and literature when it is computationally mediated and generated, a situation I call the "algorithmic condition."
- Is Part Of:
- Essays in romanticism. Volume 23:Issue 1(2016:Jan.)
- Journal:
- Essays in romanticism
- Issue:
- Volume 23:Issue 1(2016:Jan.)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 23, Issue 1 (2016)
- Year:
- 2016
- Volume:
- 23
- Issue:
- 1
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2016-0023-0001-0000
- Page Start:
- 69
- Page End:
- 87
- Publication Date:
- 2016-04
- Subjects:
- William Blake -- Friedrich Kittler -- Turing Test -- Twitter -- Digital Humanities
Romanticism -- Periodicals
820.9145 - Journal URLs:
- http://romanticism.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/ ↗
- DOI:
- 10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.10 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 2049-6699
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store
- Ingest File:
- 1138.xml