I could tell you some things about my own career as a an experimental creative writer, about what a relentless diet of JG Ballard can do to the brain of a 20-year-old white male and about how a story about pilots boning during a plane crash might lead to the mass confiscation of a student literary journal by right-wing activists. But let's just say I wasn't a very good writer of experimental fiction.

Vector representations of language, from tf-idf to word2vec, have fundamentally changed the way engineers and scholars approach the analysis of the written word. In this talk, I show my evolving practice using these representations not for analysis but instead as raw material for manipulation and generation of textual output. Starting with the analogy of audio/visual signal processing, I explore the affordances of this kind of manipulation for creating unique semantic, syntactic and phonological effects, working toward an experimental poetics of "textual waveforms." The talk includes an attempt to situate this practice in the context of the history and current practice of experimental poetry, alongside contemporary advances in language-oriented computational creativity.

Allison Parrish
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet. She has recently given talks on computer-generated poetry at the Electronic Literature Organization conference, !!Con, Alt-AI, SXSW Interactive and Eyeo. From 2014 to 2016, Allison was the Digital Creative Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, and has recently been a research resident at DBRS Innovation Labs, a Processing Foundation fellow, and a visiting artist at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU. Allison holds a master's degree from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she is currently a member of the full-time faculty.

"Experimental Creative Writing with the Vectorized Word" by Allison Parrish

Maybe all I needed were some commonly used textual analysis tools wielded by data scientists and machine learning engineers. Namely: word vectors. In the lecture above, given at last week's [Strange Loop software engineering conference](https://www.thestrangeloop.com/) in St. Louis, programmer, poet, and New York University professor Allison Parrish explains her work toward an "experimental poetics of 'textual waveforms'" as a part of the larger project dubbed computational creativity.

It sounds fancy, but the idea is really just of producing text that targets "how it makes your brain feel." It's text that's liberated, in a sense, from literal meaning. But that's still meaningful.

Parrish's explanations of this stuff are pretty clear, so I'll leave you alone with the presentation. It ends with some cool word vector experiments and a poetry reading. Maybe the first-ever at a software engineering conference?

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How to Harness Data Science for Experimental Creative Writing

FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

How to Harness Data Science for Experimental Creative Writing

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