January 2012
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Pseudonyms drive communities →
Analysis from discussion thread provider Disqus indicates that pseudonymous users contribute more comments, and more valuable comments, than either anonymous users or users authenticating with their “real” identities (through, e.g., Facebook). There’s an interesting write-up at Socialbeat. (via bb)
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Watch(via MAKE | Android Sign Language Interpreting Glove)
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Algorithmically generated combinatoric poem from...
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“The book is conceptual, but seems to be as far from a conceptual joke as is...”
– Nick Montfort’s review of Robert Fitterman’s Holocaust Museum.
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How The Cave of Time taught us to love interactive... →
Great article in Slate about the early history of Choose Your Own Adventure books, and Cave of Time in particular. Includes some great quotes from Infocom developer David Lebling and a link to Christian Swineheart’s sweet CYOA visualizations. Cave of Time is straight up one of my favorite books; I wrote an essay and made some generative text projects about it, which you can view here.
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Ultimate Flirt-off
Screenshots from Ultimate Flirt-Off, probably the best game about conversation I’ve ever played. You need good reflexes and a sharp eye to spot the best next word to say, or your flirtatious conversation will end in disaster. I would love to play a version of this game that has a more fleshed out dialogue “tree,” with more room for expression and nuance. Ultimate Flirt-Off...
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“I tend to liken horse_ebooks to some wacky public access show you might have...”
– The Ballad of @Horse_ebooks | Splitsider
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“Reconsidering Mathematical Applied Linguistics in Post-Apocalyptic Slam Poems”
– Mashing together Linguistics and Creative Writing with Hampshire College’s course title generator.
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Wordnik’s Online Dictionary - No Arbiters, Please →
Nice little NY Times shout-out to the electronic lexicographers at Wordnik and COCA. I’m looking forward to the day when the argument that “it’s not a word if it’s not in the dictionary” doesn’t make sense to anyone.
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“The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained...”
– Professor Matthew Kirschenbaum in this great NY Times article about his work and his recent talk at NYPL Labs. Kirschenbaum is writing a book about “the impact of digital media throughout all sectors of contemporary literary composition, publishing, reception, and archival preservation.”
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Algorithm Measures Human Pecking Order →
A good article about a fascinating study from researchers at Cornell. They analyzed the text of Wikipedia editorial discussions and transcripts of Supreme Court oral arguments to show that participants in written conversations share certain markers of linguistic style—and that participants of lower status will tend to imitate the style of participants of higher status. It’s a very creative...
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December 2011
25 posts
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Holiday hiatus
Our holiday hiatus will continue until the week of the 26th. Thanks for reading!
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National Novel Plagiarism Month
thinkstank:
Remix culture variation on the traditional National Novel Writing Month: you have one month to rewrite, from memory and without any references, a novel that you have previously read.
This is probably the best idea anyone has ever had.
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WatchBeautiful: Overscan is a video art installation that analyzes and transforms real-time television signals. It includes a system to extract text from the closed caption stream; in the video above, you can see it generating a concordance for the word “media.” (via CreativeApplications.Net)
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