

Why We Need Poetry Technology - thundercomb
http://thecombedthunderclap.blogspot.com/2015/03/why-we-need-poetry-technology.html

======
evencounsel
I'd like to thank the author for posting this. I spent two years of my BA
trying just this sort of thing, recombining text programmatically to produce
new work. I traced the history of found art, discovered Goldsmith, and took up
programming in my spare time just to pursue this. The first program I ever
wrote was a shoddy PHP implementation of MegaHAL: Markov chains and so on,
stitching together bits of Twitter fluff. I got a lot of blank stares when I
stood up to present in class, and I gave up on procedural poetry -- and poetry
in general, really -- after I graduated, thinking that it was just too flimsy
an idea for people to accept. I am very, very glad to see that I am not -- or
was not -- alone in my thinking. Thanks a lot, thundercomb.

~~~
thundercomb
you're most welcome. hearing this encourages me to continue on my journey, to
tinker and explore. thank you for the feedback. it sounds like you had fun,
and perhaps you could pick it up again... there's certainly a shortage of
people exploring the field.

------
abathur
I'm a little skeptical about whether poetry science/technology will _take_ ,
largely because the literature community is going to be suspicious of the last
half of your terms, and the tech/science communities will be suspicious of the
first. :)

That said, it's nascent, and it may be a while before terms, norms and
practices settle. I completed my MFA in 2012 with a thesis I'd call
computational poetry or computational literature. Goldsmith as you mention is
trying to float uncreative writing--which I think is a decent-enough broad
term that covers a lot of territory, but I suspect it, too, won't find much
purchase outside of literary circles.

I'm happy to get this chance to discover a number of your projects,
particularly the PoetryDB. You may already know this, but I also wanted to
point out that the field of computational literary criticism and analysis are
also building steam, and you may want to think of your DB/API in terms of both
a creative service for computational poets, and a service to computational
literary critics.

You may want to see work by Franco Moretti for a starting point here if you
aren't familiar (particularly "Graphs Maps Trees", and "Distant Reading").
There's a nice review for starters in Wired from a few years ago. Moretti
himself laments the lack of shared tools and resources (well--let's be honest,
_everyone_ doing this is lamenting it) when it comes to machine-readable texts
and analysis.

Thanks for posting.

~~~
thundercomb
while researching the blog post it crossed my mind that a technology capable
of judging aesthetic value may also therefore be capable of recognising when
it (or a sister technology) has generated poetry / literature that has
aesthetic value. in other words they are complementary. i was only
incidentally aware of the computational literary criticism movement, so
obviously this will now inform my continuing research. thanks very much for
that, and for the pointers.

it's true what you say, there is a danger of isolation from both communities.
i'm optimistic though. the traditional divide between science and humanities
(with computation leaning towards the former) is, in many ways, a false
dichotomy.

i hope over time to demonstrate why this is so.

~~~
abathur
When it comes to actually quantifying value things are still pretty crude as
far as I've seen. I can't recall seeing much that is this aspirational yet.
There's an interesting site/paper from 2013
([http://poetryassessor.com/poetry/](http://poetryassessor.com/poetry/)) which
attempts to rate a subset of poems on a amateur-to-professional scale.

Concepts like "amateur" and "professional" and aesthetic value are slippery
even for those of us who really enjoy poetry. It's worth realizing that
aesthetic judgement can break down into a number of sub-tasks, most of which
take for granted that we mean something like, "evaluate whether or not it is
statistically likely that a blood-and-bones human will like this poem."

I think that may be a trap. I think I'm far more interested in what poetry the
computer finds interesting than in what poetry the computer thinks I will find
interesting. The analogue in human experience is the difference between a poet
writing poems they think their audience (be it end readers, or the slush
readers at a given journal) will like, and a poet writing poems _they
themselves_ find interesting.

~~~
thundercomb
Yes, I tend to agree with you on both counts … Quantitative and statistical
approaches are unlikely to uncover poetic aesthetics by themselves. If
economics has turned out to be hard to predict, after more than a century of
quantitative efforts in that direction, I don’t hold out much hope for poetry
or literature in general. I was thinking more along the lines of machine
learning and language learning as starting points. On the second point, this
is quite an exciting view to take in my opinion. The far end of the spectrum
is that we begin to see AI as “subjects” in their own right. Not necessarily
“flesh-and-bones” subjects who are human-like, but different entities with
their own possibilities, and yet capable of interfacing with humans. Would we
find their aesthetic tastes understandable? Could we learn to love it?

~~~
abathur
The reason my interest is in "what they find interesting" is because so much
of poetry is surprise. We rarely praise a poem that uses the words we expect
right where we expect them, and ended up right where we thought it would.
(aside: check your twitter mentions, please?)

It seems at least plausible to me that non-human agents could be Good For
Poetry as long as we can clear a very specific hurdle. The hurdle is the fact
that most people see art as something an artist--a human full of agency and
intentionality--makes to communicate or share beauty. Obliquely, I think this
definitional hurdle is a big part of why many struggle to find value in art
produced from modernism on. I offered up this alternative definition of art
(in the context of whether software can be art) in another thread a few weeks
ago:

Art is something--a sort of significance--we experience, and not really
something we make. When we say we're "making art", we're making an object or
giving a performance that we hope will induce others to have the experience of
art. In reality, "making art" is an interpretative process; art, like love, is
an experience--not an object.

The point is that software most certainly induces people to have the art-
experience, both intentionally and unintentionally. It's probably less common
for source code to induce the art-experience (intentionally or not), but I
suspect this too happens.

~~~
thundercomb
i like your definition of art as an experience; and the creation of art, then,
as the communication of experience. there are many different types of
experience, which accounts for the diversity of art.

------
georgeoliver
This reminds me very much of a fantastic old program, [http://westbury.on-
rev.com/JanusNode/](http://westbury.on-rev.com/JanusNode/)

~~~
thundercomb
thanks, i hadn't heard of JanusNode before. considering how long it's been
around, i'm surprised - i do believe it deserves more recognition. a cursory
play with its functionality suggests it's going to be interesting to explore.
:-)

------
igravious
How does this (poetry technology) differ from electronic poetry[0]? There must
be some degree of overlap. PoetryDB sounds fascinating, could you go into more
detail? I was tinkering with an electronic poetry publishing platform which I
called Poetify[1] but I didn't get too far. It requires Ruby 1.8 and Camping
so it's a bit quirky.

I have been mulling the idea of a standardised electronic poetry markup
(PoetryML) for some time, this would facilitate openness, sharing and
innovation in the field. Of course, it's not an easy task to come up with a
file format that encompasses all this experimentation. I have some concrete
thoughts on the matter and a small bit of working code...

My friend and colleague, Giovanna Di Rosario, recently wrote this
dissertation, _Electronic Poetry: Understanding Poetry in the Digital
Environment_ [2]. Great to see a fellow HNer into this deeply interesting
field.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_poetry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_poetry)

[1]
[https://github.com/igravious/poetify/tree/clean_raine](https://github.com/igravious/poetify/tree/clean_raine)

[2] [http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/electronic-poetry-
underst...](http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/electronic-poetry-
understanding-poetry-digital-environment)

~~~
thundercomb
PoetryDB is intended to be a database of poetry consumable via an API. You can
try it out at [http://poetrydb.org](http://poetrydb.org). The API is
documented on github at
[https://github.com/thundercomb/poetrydb](https://github.com/thundercomb/poetrydb).

There is definitely overlap between Digital Poetry and Poetry Technology.
However as the name suggests, Poetry Technology is more than the resulting
instances of poetry. It is as much, if not more, about the technological
process and mediation.

Digital Poetry is perhaps more apt as a marketing label to a consumer (just as
we might say, “I like listening to electronic music”). From the point of view
of a practitioner, my objection to Digital Poetry as a label is that it is two
dimensional, and casts poetry technology as a variant of existing poetry,
whereas this is misleading.

Digital Poetry, unfairly or not, is not on the whole viewed too seriously by
the literary establishment. It is considered to be gimmicky and perhaps even a
failed attempt to achieve “serious” or mainstream literary work. Poetry
Technology aims to set that right, by drawing attention to the technology, the
process, the body of knowledge that it draws from, the theory that can inform
the practice and application, the potential works that could be created. It is
much more than a label.

 __*

Your markup project sounds intriguing. Would love to keep in touch to hear how
it progresses, do you have a preferred way of being contacted?

I also tried the poetify weblink but the website doesn’t seem to be running at
present.

Thanks for the links.

~~~
igravious
> I also tried the poetify weblink but the website doesn’t seem to be running
> at present.

I know :( I upgraded Ruby past 1.8 and broke my own app :( but the code is
there for you to have a gander at and the README gets at what I was trying to
do.

> Your markup project sounds intriguing. Would love to keep in touch to hear
> how it progresses, do you have a preferred way of being contacted?

Your database of poetry consumable via an API sounds intriguing. I would love
to keep in touch to hear how it progresses! Would this be able to support a
poetry sharing social network of authors, followers, and readers?

~~~
thundercomb
That's an interesting suggesting. There is no reason that the API can't be
extended to accept posts of actual new poems. The reason this hasn't been done
is largely practical, because I'd have to tackle the security and
authentication side, and probably put in place some moderation too. A truly
multi-tenanted social database, where people can share their content or keep
it private as the case may be, sounds intriguing. However this would be a much
larger undertaking. The current incarnation of PoetryDB had a somewhat
simpler, less "social", aim.

 __*

Thanks again for drawing my attention to ELMCIP, it looks like a treasure
trove of learning in Electronic Literature. I tried to access the full text of
Giovanna's thesis, but unfortunately the link seems to be broken.

PS: Wrt your earlier question, I don't mean to sound hung up about labels, and
what to call such and such. This tends to be a futile exercise anyway, as to
what will be taken up in popular usage. What I do think is worth reiterating
is that poetry technology in particular tries to shift attention away from
digital poetry as simply "poetry in another medium", and moves "lower down the
stack" to investigate and clarify the real material and symbolic grounds that
give rise to digital poetry / electronic literature. This material and
symbolic ground is necessarily a combination of the new aspect, namely
information technology at large, text processing technologies, program
language techniques, data science, and the specific methods that can be
applied to language learning and pseudo language learning, etc. ; as well as
the traditional and ongoing aspect, namely the body of poetry since the dawn
of civilisation, the literary criticisms and appraisals that took shape around
it, formal understandings of poetics, etc. In other words poetry technology is
about bringing together two considerable traditions in their own right (one
new, one old). The danger, at least from the mainstream point of view, has
been to see this as gimmicky, a recurring flirtation. Poetry technology is
saying there's more to it, they're in a relationship now.

