Grand Text Auto

All AAAI conference proceedings are now available to the public at no cost. This is the first step in the AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) initiative to make all the content in its digital library freely available. Yay!

Yoot Saito, the developer of SimTower and the deeply uncanny Seaman (you remember, the Dreamcast game with the microphone interface and the fishlike creature with the head of a man and the voice of, specifically, Leonard Nimoy) has developed an amusing and odd caveman simulator called Gabo. It runs on the iPhone, but you won’t be able to get it because Apple has nixed the game. I suppose people didn’t want to lick their iPhones anymore after interacting with Gabo.

Caleb Emmons has assigned a unique number to every poem. And bpNichol has written the complete works. What’s left to do?

Currently up at The Big Jewel is a rendition of a famous Robert Frost poem as a BASIC program. Thanks for the link, Jason.

And, something that way more people online are interested in and which is turning out to be much more lucrative than Save Karyn: Take Natalie.

Sentences
By Charles O. Hartman and Hugh Kenner
Sun and Moon Press
New American Poetry Series: 18
1995
84 p.

Sentences begins.

money must
Sentences
Parsing
Sentences
Sentences
Sentences for love forsaken.

Oddly enough, there’s Rara Racer. (Thanks, Jaroslav.)

An elusive 3.5″ diskette of William Gibson’s Agrippa has finally been located, and video of a 1992-era Mac computer running it under System 7 is now available (along with the bit-for-bit image of the disk itself) on The Agrippa Files. The site is part of Alan Liu’s Transcriptions Project at UCSB, with this emulation prepared by Matt Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside of Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities with help from several others, including Robert Maxwell at the University of Maryland’s Digital Forensics Lab. New bootleg video footage of the Agrippa launch event – an hour’s worth – is also now online. Many, many details of the process of recovering and presenting this important piece of imaginative, poetic software are available in the article “No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa.”

Blogging
By Jill Walker Rettberg
Digital Media and Society Series
Polity
2008
184 pp.

Blogging suits two sorts of readers perfectly: traditional writers (and instructors) looking to understanding more about writing in digital media, and the tech-savvy (including today’s students) seeking to reflect on blogging and understand the practice more deeply, as something that is potentially social, narrative, literary, and political. While elegantly written, the book delves into the history of hypertext, the nature of social networks, and oral and print cultures in addition to covering Web history through the 2.0 days, corporate blogging, hoaxes, and the relationship of blogging to journalism. For students who are to learn about writing and the Web through blogging, this book is a must. Accessible to undergraduates, it goes beyond how-tos and chronicling to inquire about where blogging has been, is now, and will go. Finally, there’s coverage of so many aspects of blogging that only an uber-blogger would know it all already. Even new media scholars and bloggers will benefit from Blogging.

The students in my Comparative Media Studies Workshop have just shared their Web edition of the first anthology of Imagist poetry, edited by Ezra Pound and published in 1914. Des Imagistes was not (as far as I could determine) previously available online, isn’t in print, and is not even very easily found in libraries. We don’t have a copy of it here at MIT, for instance.

Jason Nelson’s new game is called “i made this. you play this. we are enemies.”

The game deals with the difficult issue of his current residence in Australia. It is an investigation of the link, and of corporations and communities on the Web. There are video snippets with unusual stories or story-like discourses (about potatoes, a jar of hands, and so on) embedded within the game. There are screenshots and things to read – or not read, which might be more typical of the Web experience. Figure and ground are constantly at play, unless you are better than I am at discerning what parts of the image are background and what parts are the platforms and walls and such. And it looks pretty much like this:

To follow up on the 1K story generator I posted ten days ago, here is a slightly revised version of that generator and two new ones.

• story1.py – Story generation by elision. This is a slightly modified version of the November 20 “original.” It uses a sequence of (specially written) sentences; all but 5-9 sentences are removed and the remaining text is presented as the story.

e-mail trouble: love & addiction @ the matrix
By S. Paige Baty
University of Texas Press
1999
167 pp.

A great programming language, which I happen to have used very productively for computational experimentation, art, and teaching, has just finally been released after many years of development and (very functional) beta versions. It’s Processing 1.0, now ready for download. Congratulations to Ben Fry, Casey Reas, and the others who have participated in the project, and yay for us. Here’s the blurb on Processing 1.0:

Today, on November 24, 2008, we launch the 1.0 version of the Processing software. Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Sam Deese is working to foster student digital scholarship projects at Boston University. He asked me about good free software for editing video and for producing slideshows with voice-overs. I didn’t know the answer – do you?

Michael’s here at MIT and just gave a great talk. While he was preparing for it, apropos of conversations I’ve had recently with him and Beth Cardier, I wrote something that I think is a story generator, and which is a self-contained 1K python program. Here it is: story1.py (Update: This is a slightly modified version of November 30, which uses the same algorithm but has a streamlined implementation and a few more sentences.)

Let me know if you think it’s a story generator, and, whether or not you think it is, if you think of anything interesting about stories and computation as a result of looking at the program and running it.

New on Turbulence.org:

“Bronx Rhymes” by Claudia Bernett and Maria Ioveva. “Bronx Rhymes” illuminates the history and significance of Hip Hop in the Bronx by tagging important locations for Hip Hop (1520 Sedgwick, for example) with posters. Each poster describes the historical significance of that location in the form of a rhyme, and invites people walking by to join in a rhyming battle by txt-ing their own rhyme from their mobile phone. The website bronxrhymes.org displays the artists and locations along with all the submitted rhymes elevating the most recent submission.

I wanted to call everyone’s attention to an article by Chris Crawford about whether games are art, published this summer in Notes On Game Dev. The article offers many interesting observations, and I suggest that those interested in the question read it. My purpose in mentioning it, however, is not to repeat it, rephrase it, or respond to it, but to pose a different and related question.

Jarel presenta Venenarius Verborum (video):

Tras el misterioso fallecimiento del brujo propietario, el año pasado, sus herederos pusieron inmediatamente en venta la torre.
No faltan potenciales compradores para la finca, pero existe un grave problema, y es que la torre es indestructible, inquebrantable… o lo será mientras persistan en ella ciertos objetos que el brujo encantó: Los Siete Objetos. Objetos cargados de energía mágica.
En vistas de que no logran vender, ni desahuciar a los inquilinos y sirvientes del brujo que aún permanecen allí, los herederos han decidido contratar a un especialista en recoger objetos para limpiar la torre.
Basada en Ad Verbum, de Nick Montfort.

Violet, Nightfall, and Everybody Dies are the top three games in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition, after a month and a half of play and voting by the public. Congratulations to Jeremy Freese, Eric Eve, Jim Munroe, and the authors of all the entries. You can still download all the games, of course. The full list of results is also up.

• James Wallis, in his presentation A Thing of Beauty is a Stout Green Toy, explains the relationship between the Oulipo, game books, and RPGs, also explaining why orcs are green and have upward-pointing tusks. (Thanks, Roger.)
• Jason Rohrer has a new game, Between, which is for two remote players, who interact only indirectly, and is hosted exclusively by Esquire. It’s up to you to determine whether or not the game is about masculinity.

• It’s been almost a year since an early version of this game was released, and it’s still apparently in stasis, but lovers of retro serious games (which have only become more topical) would do well to note Oil’s Well Redrilled, a remake of a Sierra On-Line game.

I’m here in México D.F. participating in the UAM Cuajimalpa’s 3rd International Colloquium in Creativity, Cognition and Computers, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first computer installation in México (and Latin America). Today we had short presentations in a roundtable format.

To start us off, Rafael Peréz y Peréz (UAM Cuajimalpa) described a project, now underway, to have two MEXICA agents improvise a story together.

CALC-09

Boulder, Colorado, on June 4 or 5, 2009, in conjunction with NAACL-HLT 2009
Deadline for paper submissions: February 27, 2009.
Workshop homepage

It is generally agreed upon that “linguistic creativity” is a unique property of human language. Some claim that linguistic creativity is expressed in our ability to combine known words in a new sentence, others refer to our skill to express thoughts in figurative language, and yet others talk about syntactic recursion and lexical creativity.

For the purpose of this workshop, we treat the term “linguistic creativity” to mean “creative language usage at different levels”, from the lexicon to syntax to discourse and text (see also topics, below).

Thomson Reuters, which vends EndNote, has leveled a $10 million lawsuit at the makers of open-source citation management software Zotero, alleging that the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University violated a license agreement by making their software interoperable. This dispute has some interesting nuances, as MacKenzie Smith describes:

An interesting twist to the case is that Thomson had previously encouraged EndNote users (primarily scholars) to create their own citation format style sheets for use in the software, and to share them with each other via donation back to Thomson or by posting on public web sites. But now Thomson is enforcing sole ownership of those style sheets regardless of who created them or where they’re located. In other words, unbeknownst to them EndNote users have been creating and sharing proprietary EndNote style sheets for years, but only at Thomson Reuters’ discretion …

It only ran from 2004-2006, but let us remember THIS IS FUN TO MAKE A BLOG ON THE COMPUTER WEBSITE.

Zone : Zero
Stephanie Strickland
Ahsahta Press
2008

But never met this Fellow / Attended, or alone / Without a tighter breathing / And Zero at the Bone— Stephanie Strickland’s Zone is not just a area of restriction; it is one where number and its limits are revealed, where they play. It is one of zero. One and zero alternate in “Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot,” the Web and print poem about how carbon and silicon, and life and computation, interrelate. This poem and “slippingglimpse” are offered on CD and on the pages. It’s a delight to have them to hand as well as to screen. Strickland is master of the hybrid book of leaves and bits, and she shows her mastery here, one foot on earth, one lifted in air. The book offers poems on war and Gödel, a profound series purportedly about absinthe, and a poem made largely of parentheses. Zone : Zero is a strick land, a spare, encompassing, wonderful sector where nature and language twine.