Pragmatist Utopia? The Launch of a National Digital Public Library
On the launch of the Digital Public Library of America.
Posts Tagged ‘lit and tech’
Novel-writing as performance art
What an awesome and terrifying idea: novelist Silvia Hartmann will write her next novel live on Google Docs and let anyone who wants to follow along—and send her feedback on her work. (Via.) Hartmann explains in a press release on her website:
This project, known as “Hartmann Book Live” aims to go one step further [...]
Let Me Write: An Interview with Joshua Cohen
Fiercely protective of his writing time, Joshua Cohen (Four New Messages) makes no apologies for keeping his interview answers pithy: “The book is the oil painting above the grand piano of the future. Certain households have them. We/they know who they are.”
Earn your internet access—by writing
Writers are full of tricks to get themselves to actually WRITE. We’ve covered a lot of them here on FWR: positive reinforcement (with tools like Written? Kitten!, which rewards you with photos of cute cats), fear (with apps like Write or Die, which plays annoying noises—or deletes your work!—if you stop writing), and flat-out [...]
Texts from famous authors (and characters)
I get a childish delight out of anachronistic mashups, so the Paris Review’s
drunk texts from Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, and more are right in my wheelhouse:
Read the full set on the Paris Review’s site.
Meanwhile, on The Hairpin, Mallory Ortberg imagines texts from Jane Eyre–the character:
JANE WHERE HAVE YOU GONE
I AM BEREFT AND WITHOUT [...]
On Writing Blind
I just finished teaching for the term, and this past class was a bit unusual: I had two legally blind students. All of my students were phenomenal, but I was particularly floored by the dedication of those two—one of whom did the class reading by listening to his computer read the stories aloud.
This all got [...]
The ghost in the (writing) machine
Not long ago, we talked about the phenomenon of robots writing books. But those computer-authored tomes—with scintillating subject matter like Saltine Cracker were mish-mashes of text culled together from Wikipedia and other websites. Computers can’t write actual stories.
Or can they?
Enter Narrative Science, a Chicago-based software company teaching computers to do just that—well, news [...]
How to write more: Blackmail yourself?
Perhaps, like many of us, you’re the kind of person who won’t do anything without a (proverbial) gun to your head. But it’s hard to type while holding a gun to your own head, no? Leave it to technology to solve this problem: enter Aherk!, which describes itself as a free “goal-oriented self-blackmailing [...]
Police Composite sketches for literary characters
Like most readers, you probably have your own mental image of Humbert Humbert, or Emma Bovary, or the Misfit. But if you’re the kind of person who likes a visual, check out The Composites, a Tumblr site that plugs literary descriptions of characters into police composite sketch software. The results are… well, take [...]
Robots Writing Novels?
So a monkey typing into infinity will eventually produce Shakespeare—or so the theory goes. Maybe robots would be faster?
The New York Times recently discussed the phenomenon of robots writing books. After an encounter with a robo-writer called Lambert M. Surhone—literally a computer churning out titles like “Saltine Cracker” and “Pagan Kennedy” [...]
