Algorithmic Imagination and Literary Study

Dennis Yi Tenen, Columbia U

“Algorithmic Imagination and Literary Study”

https://dennistenen.com/publications/

Computers love to read. And it’s not just fiction before going to bed. They read voraciously, all literature, all of the time, in every sense of the word—novels, encyclopedias, academic articles, private messages, advertisements, love letters, news stories, hate speech, and crime reports—everything written, no matter how insignificant.

This ingested print contains scraps of human wisdom and emotion—the information and disinformation, fact and metaphor. While we were building railroads, fighting wars, and buying shoes online, the machine child went to school. Literary computers work everywhere in the background today. They power search engines, recommendations systems, and customer service chat bots. They filter spam and offensive content. At the hospital, they convert patient-doctor conversations into billable codes. Justly or unjustly, they may alert law enforcement about a potential terrorist plot by monitoring social media conversations. Legal professionals use them to hide or to discover evidence of corporate fraud. Your children may be writing their next school paper with an aid of a smart word processor, capable not just of completing sentences, but generating entire paragraphs—books upon books—on any topic.

You may think of these powers as contemporary developments, in the domain of computer science. But, machines have been getting smarter in this way for centuries, advancing by the developments in field of language science: philology, linguistics, literary analysis, communication theory, rhetoric, and semiotics.

What does it mean to study literature written for and by machines? Initially, we imagine the answer to lie in something that reads like computer-generated fiction or poetry (similar to Bob Brown’s Readies discussed in Chapter 2 of Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism). Or perhaps, we can discuss the advent of e-books, described in my “Concise History of the Electronic Book.” Media theorists may point to Friedrich Kittler’s “death of literature”—surging through underwater cables—inscriptions invisible, unreadable, and incomprehensible.

In this talk, I would like to suggest another answer: Machine literature departs the familiar world of human genres. Instead, we encounter strange, new formations—an entirely separate branch of the literary arts. Based on several historical examples, I will suggest an alternative, archival (pre- and post-digital) genealogy of machine literature. In conclusion, we will discuss the methodological challenges inherent in the study of this archive.

Further Reading: “Chapter 2, Reading Machines: Machine Poetry and Excavatory Reading” in Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014), pages 56-78.

“Introduction” to Friedrich Kittler’s Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford UP, 1999).

“Reading Platforms: A Concise History of the Electronic Book” by Dennis Yi Tenen, Chapter 22 in The Unfinished Book (Oxford UP, 2020), ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Shauna Lynch.

Bio Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English Literature, Digital Humanities, and New Media Studies at Columbia University. A long-time affiliate of Columbia’s Data Science Institute and formerly a Microsoft engineer and a Berkman Center for Internet and Society Fellow, his code runs on millions of personal computers worldwide.

His research happens at the intersection of texts, people, and technologies. He is one of the founders of Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities and author of Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford UP, 2017). You can find him on Twitter @dennistenen, GitHub at github.com/denten, and Stack Exchange. He teaches courses on literary theory, media history, computational narratology, and critical computing at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. He also occasionally teaches at Columbia's Journalism School, in the Computer Science Department, and at DHSI. His affiliations include: New Media Center at the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering and Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

He is the author of Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford UP, 2017). His work appears also on the pages of Amodern, boundary 2, Computational Culture, Modernism/modernity, New Literary History, Public Books, and LA Review of Books on topics that range from book piracy to algorithmic composition, unintelligent design, and history of data visualization. For an updated list of projects, talks, and publications please visit dennistenen.com.