6 ms·

Why We Need Poetry Technology

15 points by thundercomb 12y ago

georgeoliver 12y ago
This reminds me very much of a fantastic old program, http://westbury.on-rev.com/JanusNode/ http://westbury.on-rev.com/JanusNode/
- thundercomb 12y ago
  thanks, i hadn't heard of JanusNode before. considering how long it's been around, i'm surprised - i do believe it deserves more recognition. a cursory play with its functionality suggests it's going to be interesting to explore. :-)
- igravious 12y ago
  Seems to be mentioned on this Electronic Literature Organisation blog post waaaaay down the page: http://eliterature.org/2014/06/announcing-winners-of-1st-coover-hayles-awards/ http://eliterature.org/2014/06/announcing-winners-of-1st-coo... :)
abathur 12y ago
I'm a little skeptical about whether poetry science/technology will take, largely because the literature community is going to be suspicious of the last half of your terms, and the tech/science communities will be suspicious of the first. :) That said, it's nascent, and it may be a while before terms, norms and practices settle. I completed my MFA in 2012 with a thesis I'd call computational poetry or computational literature. Goldsmith as you mention is trying to float uncreative writing--which I think is a decent-enough broad term that covers a lot of territory, but I suspect it, too, won't find much purchase outside of literary circles. I'm happy to get this chance to discover a number of your projects, particularly the PoetryDB. You may already know this, but I also wanted to point out that the field of computational literary criticism and analysis are also building steam, and you may want to think of your DB/API in terms of both a creative service for computational poets, and a service to computational literary critics. You may want to see work by Franco Moretti for a starting point here if you aren't familiar (particularly "Graphs Maps Trees", and "Distant Reading"). There's a nice review for starters in Wired from a few years ago. Moretti himself laments the lack of shared tools and resources (well--let's be honest, everyone doing this is lamenting it) when it comes to machine-readable texts and analysis. Thanks for posting.
- thundercomb 12y ago
  while researching the blog post it crossed my mind that a technology capable of judging aesthetic value may also therefore be capable of recognising when it (or a sister technology) has generated poetry / literature that has aesthetic value. in other words they are complementary. i was only incidentally aware of the computational literary criticism movement, so obviously this will now inform my continuing research. thanks very much for that, and for the pointers. it's true what you say, there is a danger of isolation from both communities. i'm optimistic though. the traditional divide between science and humanities (with computation leaning towards the former) is, in many ways, a false dichotomy. i hope over time to demonstrate why this is so.
  - abathur 12y ago
    When it comes to actually quantifying value things are still pretty crude as far as I've seen. I can't recall seeing much that is this aspirational yet. There's an interesting site/paper from 2013 (http://poetryassessor.com/poetry/ http://poetryassessor.com/poetry/) which attempts to rate a subset of poems on a amateur-to-professional scale. Concepts like "amateur" and "professional" and aesthetic value are slippery even for those of us who really enjoy poetry. It's worth realizing that aesthetic judgement can break down into a number of sub-tasks, most of which take for granted that we mean something like, "evaluate whether or not it is statistically likely that a blood-and-bones human will like this poem." I think that may be a trap. I think I'm far more interested in what poetry the computer finds interesting than in what poetry the computer thinks I will find interesting. The analogue in human experience is the difference between a poet writing poems they think their audience (be it end readers, or the slush readers at a given journal) will like, and a poet writing poems they themselves find interesting.
    - thundercomb 12y ago
      Yes, I tend to agree with you on both counts … Quantitative and statistical approaches are unlikely to uncover poetic aesthetics by themselves. If economics has turned out to be hard to predict, after more than a century of quantitative efforts in that direction, I don’t hold out much hope for poetry or literature in general. I was thinking more along the lines of machine learning and language learning as starting points. On the second point, this is quite an exciting view to take in my opinion. The far end of the spectrum is that we begin to see AI as “subjects” in their own right. Not necessarily “flesh-and-bones” subjects who are human-like, but different entities with their own possibilities, and yet capable of interfacing with humans. Would we find their aesthetic tastes understandable? Could we learn to love it?
evencounsel 12y ago
I'd like to thank the author for posting this. I spent two years of my BA trying just this sort of thing, recombining text programmatically to produce new work. I traced the history of found art, discovered Goldsmith, and took up programming in my spare time just to pursue this. The first program I ever wrote was a shoddy PHP implementation of MegaHAL: Markov chains and so on, stitching together bits of Twitter fluff. I got a lot of blank stares when I stood up to present in class, and I gave up on procedural poetry -- and poetry in general, really -- after I graduated, thinking that it was just too flimsy an idea for people to accept. I am very, very glad to see that I am not -- or was not -- alone in my thinking. Thanks a lot, thundercomb.
- thundercomb 12y ago
  you're most welcome. hearing this encourages me to continue on my journey, to tinker and explore. thank you for the feedback. it sounds like you had fun, and perhaps you could pick it up again... there's certainly a shortage of people exploring the field.
- igravious 12y ago
  It is my opinion that traditional poetry will be seen as a proper/strict subset of procedural poetry in time. You are most definitely not alone in your thinking, your idea was too far ahead of its time for those people you presented it to. Do you have your code anywhere online? This was my attempt: https://github.com/igravious/poetify/tree/clean_raine https://github.com/igravious/poetify/tree/clean_raine but it is broken at the moment ... sigh This post makes me want to fix it.
igravious 12y ago
How does this (poetry technology) differ from electronic poetry[0]? There must be some degree of overlap. PoetryDB sounds fascinating, could you go into more detail? I was tinkering with an electronic poetry publishing platform which I called Poetify[1] but I didn't get too far. It requires Ruby 1.8 and Camping so it's a bit quirky. I have been mulling the idea of a standardised electronic poetry markup (PoetryML) for some time, this would facilitate openness, sharing and innovation in the field. Of course, it's not an easy task to come up with a file format that encompasses all this experimentation. I have some concrete thoughts on the matter and a small bit of working code... My friend and colleague, Giovanna Di Rosario, recently wrote this dissertation, Electronic Poetry: Understanding Poetry in the Digital Environment[2]. Great to see a fellow HNer into this deeply interesting field. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_poetry [1] https://github.com/igravious/poetify/tree/clean_raine https://github.com/igravious/poetify/tree/clean_raine [2] http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/electronic-poetry-understanding-poetry-digital-environment http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/electronic-poetry-underst...
- thundercomb 12y ago
  PoetryDB is intended to be a database of poetry consumable via an API. You can try it out at http://poetrydb.org http://poetrydb.org. The API is documented on github at https://github.com/thundercomb/poetrydb https://github.com/thundercomb/poetrydb. There is definitely overlap between Digital Poetry and Poetry Technology. However as the name suggests, Poetry Technology is more than the resulting instances of poetry. It is as much, if not more, about the technological process and mediation. Digital Poetry is perhaps more apt as a marketing label to a consumer (just as we might say, “I like listening to electronic music”). From the point of view of a practitioner, my objection to Digital Poetry as a label is that it is two dimensional, and casts poetry technology as a variant of existing poetry, whereas this is misleading. Digital Poetry, unfairly or not, is not on the whole viewed too seriously by the literary establishment. It is considered to be gimmicky and perhaps even a failed attempt to achieve “serious” or mainstream literary work. Poetry Technology aims to set that right, by drawing attention to the technology, the process, the body of knowledge that it draws from, the theory that can inform the practice and application, the potential works that could be created. It is much more than a label. * Your markup project sounds intriguing. Would love to keep in touch to hear how it progresses, do you have a preferred way of being contacted? I also tried the poetify weblink but the website doesn’t seem to be running at present. Thanks for the links.

15 points by thundercomb 12y ago

This reminds me very much of a fantastic old program, http://westbury.on-rev.com/JanusNode/ http://westbury.on-rev.com/JanusNode/

thundercomb 12y ago
thanks, i hadn't heard of JanusNode before. considering how long it's been around, i'm surprised - i do believe it deserves more recognition. a cursory play with its functionality suggests it's going to be interesting to explore. :-)
igravious 12y ago
Seems to be mentioned on this Electronic Literature Organisation blog post waaaaay down the page: http://eliterature.org/2014/06/announcing-winners-of-1st-coover-hayles-awards/ http://eliterature.org/2014/06/announcing-winners-of-1st-coo... :)

abathur 12y ago

I'm a little skeptical about whether poetry science/technology will take, largely because the literature community is going to be suspicious of the last half of your terms, and the tech/science communities will be suspicious of the first. :) That said, it's nascent, and it may be a while before terms, norms and practices settle. I completed my MFA in 2012 with a thesis I'd call computational poetry or computational literature. Goldsmith as you mention is trying to float uncreative writing--which I think is a decent-enough broad term that covers a lot of territory, but I suspect it, too, won't find much purchase outside of literary circles. I'm happy to get this chance to discover a number of your projects, particularly the PoetryDB. You may already know this, but I also wanted to point out that the field of computational literary criticism and analysis are also building steam, and you may want to think of your DB/API in terms of both a creative service for computational poets, and a service to computational literary critics. You may want to see work by Franco Moretti for a starting point here if you aren't familiar (particularly "Graphs Maps Trees", and "Distant Reading"). There's a nice review for starters in Wired from a few years ago. Moretti himself laments the lack of shared tools and resources (well--let's be honest, everyone doing this is lamenting it) when it comes to machine-readable texts and analysis. Thanks for posting.

thundercomb 12y ago
while researching the blog post it crossed my mind that a technology capable of judging aesthetic value may also therefore be capable of recognising when it (or a sister technology) has generated poetry / literature that has aesthetic value. in other words they are complementary. i was only incidentally aware of the computational literary criticism movement, so obviously this will now inform my continuing research. thanks very much for that, and for the pointers. it's true what you say, there is a danger of isolation from both communities. i'm optimistic though. the traditional divide between science and humanities (with computation leaning towards the former) is, in many ways, a false dichotomy. i hope over time to demonstrate why this is so.
- abathur 12y ago
  When it comes to actually quantifying value things are still pretty crude as far as I've seen. I can't recall seeing much that is this aspirational yet. There's an interesting site/paper from 2013 (http://poetryassessor.com/poetry/ http://poetryassessor.com/poetry/) which attempts to rate a subset of poems on a amateur-to-professional scale. Concepts like "amateur" and "professional" and aesthetic value are slippery even for those of us who really enjoy poetry. It's worth realizing that aesthetic judgement can break down into a number of sub-tasks, most of which take for granted that we mean something like, "evaluate whether or not it is statistically likely that a blood-and-bones human will like this poem." I think that may be a trap. I think I'm far more interested in what poetry the computer finds interesting than in what poetry the computer thinks I will find interesting. The analogue in human experience is the difference between a poet writing poems they think their audience (be it end readers, or the slush readers at a given journal) will like, and a poet writing poems they themselves find interesting.
  - thundercomb 12y ago
    Yes, I tend to agree with you on both counts … Quantitative and statistical approaches are unlikely to uncover poetic aesthetics by themselves. If economics has turned out to be hard to predict, after more than a century of quantitative efforts in that direction, I don’t hold out much hope for poetry or literature in general. I was thinking more along the lines of machine learning and language learning as starting points. On the second point, this is quite an exciting view to take in my opinion. The far end of the spectrum is that we begin to see AI as “subjects” in their own right. Not necessarily “flesh-and-bones” subjects who are human-like, but different entities with their own possibilities, and yet capable of interfacing with humans. Would we find their aesthetic tastes understandable? Could we learn to love it?

evencounsel 12y ago

I'd like to thank the author for posting this. I spent two years of my BA trying just this sort of thing, recombining text programmatically to produce new work. I traced the history of found art, discovered Goldsmith, and took up programming in my spare time just to pursue this. The first program I ever wrote was a shoddy PHP implementation of MegaHAL: Markov chains and so on, stitching together bits of Twitter fluff. I got a lot of blank stares when I stood up to present in class, and I gave up on procedural poetry -- and poetry in general, really -- after I graduated, thinking that it was just too flimsy an idea for people to accept. I am very, very glad to see that I am not -- or was not -- alone in my thinking. Thanks a lot, thundercomb.

thundercomb 12y ago
you're most welcome. hearing this encourages me to continue on my journey, to tinker and explore. thank you for the feedback. it sounds like you had fun, and perhaps you could pick it up again... there's certainly a shortage of people exploring the field.
igravious 12y ago
It is my opinion that traditional poetry will be seen as a proper/strict subset of procedural poetry in time. You are most definitely not alone in your thinking, your idea was too far ahead of its time for those people you presented it to. Do you have your code anywhere online? This was my attempt: https://github.com/igravious/poetify/tree/clean_raine https://github.com/igravious/poetify/tree/clean_raine but it is broken at the moment ... sigh This post makes me want to fix it.

igravious 12y ago

How does this (poetry technology) differ from electronic poetry[0]? There must be some degree of overlap. PoetryDB sounds fascinating, could you go into more detail? I was tinkering with an electronic poetry publishing platform which I called Poetify[1] but I didn't get too far. It requires Ruby 1.8 and Camping so it's a bit quirky. I have been mulling the idea of a standardised electronic poetry markup (PoetryML) for some time, this would facilitate openness, sharing and innovation in the field. Of course, it's not an easy task to come up with a file format that encompasses all this experimentation. I have some concrete thoughts on the matter and a small bit of working code... My friend and colleague, Giovanna Di Rosario, recently wrote this dissertation, Electronic Poetry: Understanding Poetry in the Digital Environment[2]. Great to see a fellow HNer into this deeply interesting field. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_poetry [1] https://github.com/igravious/poetify/tree/clean_raine https://github.com/igravious/poetify/tree/clean_raine [2] http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/electronic-poetry-understanding-poetry-digital-environment http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/electronic-poetry-underst...

thundercomb 12y ago
PoetryDB is intended to be a database of poetry consumable via an API. You can try it out at http://poetrydb.org http://poetrydb.org. The API is documented on github at https://github.com/thundercomb/poetrydb https://github.com/thundercomb/poetrydb. There is definitely overlap between Digital Poetry and Poetry Technology. However as the name suggests, Poetry Technology is more than the resulting instances of poetry. It is as much, if not more, about the technological process and mediation. Digital Poetry is perhaps more apt as a marketing label to a consumer (just as we might say, “I like listening to electronic music”). From the point of view of a practitioner, my objection to Digital Poetry as a label is that it is two dimensional, and casts poetry technology as a variant of existing poetry, whereas this is misleading. Digital Poetry, unfairly or not, is not on the whole viewed too seriously by the literary establishment. It is considered to be gimmicky and perhaps even a failed attempt to achieve “serious” or mainstream literary work. Poetry Technology aims to set that right, by drawing attention to the technology, the process, the body of knowledge that it draws from, the theory that can inform the practice and application, the potential works that could be created. It is much more than a label. * Your markup project sounds intriguing. Would love to keep in touch to hear how it progresses, do you have a preferred way of being contacted? I also tried the poetify weblink but the website doesn’t seem to be running at present. Thanks for the links.