Thursday, July 06, 2006
I didn’t think it would be such a busy day, but when you least expect it….
Since it is my last month here for a while, a lot of people want to talk—which is cool. The first meeting was with Ali and Shaji—we discussed many ideas about re-contextualizing the Malaysia materials. Many possibilities! We talked about producing an interactive website, or a movie, and other approaches, but the one I liked best was making a cybertextual database where users could add their own materials. The main difficulty/issue then becomes how things can be interestingly presented. Shaji wants to figure out how to make a Flash movie write itself! Now there’s a farout concept…
I spoke with Lydia for an hour, about her research on mood and music, and building a taxonomy for the principals in multimedia. Reading her work made me think about things and look on the web for things I’d never considered before. Good scholarly exchange, and I hope to be involved with her future academic endeavors.
Finally I had a visit from a brand new acquaintance, an Engineering professor named Dr. Beik, who my friend Mohammad brought to the office. Beik, whose field is artificial intelligence, had caught wind of my studies in digital poetry, had attended the performance a couple of weeks ago, and wanted to talk. We had a nice discussion, then began to try to think of ways poetry and AI might successfully merge with one another. Before long we though of a project to work on, which involves using “neronets” to make poems. I don’t have the time to describe the process in detail, but like many interactive tools, you train it to do something, give it stimulus, and see what happens. So, if our idea takes off, we may try to see if we can get a computer to write verse that emulates the tone and style of a few dead poets. I think this would be an interesting experiment, and would diverge from the usual algorithm + database = syntax approach that most computer poets have used the past 45 or so years.
So I’d planned to use the day to get organized, do some teaching work, but for various reasons those things didn’t happen. But soon…
We’ll be visiting Singapore over the weekend & I’ll be making my presentation there on Monday. Should be able to file a report after that.
Since it is my last month here for a while, a lot of people want to talk—which is cool. The first meeting was with Ali and Shaji—we discussed many ideas about re-contextualizing the Malaysia materials. Many possibilities! We talked about producing an interactive website, or a movie, and other approaches, but the one I liked best was making a cybertextual database where users could add their own materials. The main difficulty/issue then becomes how things can be interestingly presented. Shaji wants to figure out how to make a Flash movie write itself! Now there’s a farout concept…
I spoke with Lydia for an hour, about her research on mood and music, and building a taxonomy for the principals in multimedia. Reading her work made me think about things and look on the web for things I’d never considered before. Good scholarly exchange, and I hope to be involved with her future academic endeavors.
Finally I had a visit from a brand new acquaintance, an Engineering professor named Dr. Beik, who my friend Mohammad brought to the office. Beik, whose field is artificial intelligence, had caught wind of my studies in digital poetry, had attended the performance a couple of weeks ago, and wanted to talk. We had a nice discussion, then began to try to think of ways poetry and AI might successfully merge with one another. Before long we though of a project to work on, which involves using “neronets” to make poems. I don’t have the time to describe the process in detail, but like many interactive tools, you train it to do something, give it stimulus, and see what happens. So, if our idea takes off, we may try to see if we can get a computer to write verse that emulates the tone and style of a few dead poets. I think this would be an interesting experiment, and would diverge from the usual algorithm + database = syntax approach that most computer poets have used the past 45 or so years.
So I’d planned to use the day to get organized, do some teaching work, but for various reasons those things didn’t happen. But soon…
We’ll be visiting Singapore over the weekend & I’ll be making my presentation there on Monday. Should be able to file a report after that.
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 8:57 AM 
