READINGS
Course Texts
Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry. Charles Hartman, 1996. ISBN: 0805819878 [*REQUIRED*]
Hartman describes how programming has helped him probe poetry's aesthetic possibilities. He discusses the nature of poetry itself and his experiences with primitive computer-generated poetry programs and traces the development of more advanced hardware and software. The central question, Hartman says, "isn't exactly whether a poet or a computer writes the poem, but what kinds of collaboration might be interesting." He examines the effects of randomness, arbitrariness, and contingency on poetic composition...
The Oulipo Compendium. Harry Matthews, Ed. 1998. ISBN: 0947757961
Exercises in Style. Raymond Queneau, 1981. ISBN: 0811207897
Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine. Bringsjord and Ferrucci, 1999 ISBN: 0805819878.
Speech and Language Processing. Jurafsky and Martin, 2006. ISBN: 0131873210
Creative Code - John Maeda
Aaron's Code - H. Cohen & P. McCorduck
Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art - I. Greenberg
Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists - Reas & Fry
Six Selections by the Oulipo (from New Media Reader) - N. Wardrip-Fruin
Indeterminacy & Sentences - John Cage
Post-script on Societies of Control - Gilles Deleuze
Agile & Refactoring
Hacking and Refactoring by Eric S. Raymond
Summary
'The open-source movement and agile programming may be converging. While reading Martin Fowler's excellent book "Refactoring", I realized development by refactoring is a sharp description of the normal style of open-source hackers...'
Martin Fowler's refactoring site
Fowler's original refactoring book
SE-Radio Refactoring pt1 (mp3)
SE-Radio Refactoring pt2 (mp3)
The Agile Manifesto
Recent Items
The House That Jack Built - Jack Burnham's Concept of "Software" as a Metaphor for Art - E.A. Shanken
Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine. - Bringsjord & Ferrucci.
the Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems - J. Burnham
An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning - Yudkowsky
Animation, interpolation & Tweening - Penner
Hacking and Painting - P. Graham
Why extends is evil - A. Holub
Resources
TREC 2005 Spam Public Corpora
The Webb Spam Corpus
Articles
'What is Digital/Electronic Writing?' by Brian Kim Stefans. [original link]
A Review of the Electronic Literature Collection - Edward Picot
'The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 (ELC1 for short) contains some extremely powerful, beautiful, clever, amusing and moving pieces of work, but it isn't entirely without flaws...'
Scott Rettberg - CURATING AMBIGUITY: The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One
--Six Selections by the Oulipo - from the New Media Reader (pdf)
--The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges
Noah Wardfrip Fruin blogs on 'Reading Processes' (Hartman, Mac Low, Oulipo, Cage, etc.)
'Indeterminancy' - John Cage, Notes/About
Notes Toward a Reading of Jackson Mac Low: 1 2 3 4
Reading Potential: The Oulipo and the Meaning of Algorithms - Mark Wolff
Paragraphs on Conceptual Art by Sol Lewitt
Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono - Selections
OTHER
A Humument - Tom Phillips - Essays on 'A Humument'