An online creative workshop with the title 'Writing with writing machines: literary engines of different types' will take place on Friday May 5th, 2023, with the participation of Dr. Manuel Portela (University of Coimbra). The online workshop will be held between 18:30-20:30 via the ZOOM platform.
The particular event is organized as part of the Erasmus+ exchange agreement between AUTh and U of Coimbra.
Language of the workshop: English.
**A certificate of attendance will be provided**
In order to ensure your online participation in the event, please fill in the form available here.
The ZOOM LINK to be used for the event will be sent to everyone registered the day before the event (May 4, 2023). A certain number of ZOOM seats are available.
This event is organized by the Creative Workshop Series 'Transparent Windows' (School of English, AUTh).
Event Coordinator: Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou (trapatz@enl.auth.gr)
For any further inquiries, do send your emails to: trapatz@enl.auth.gr (Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou).
ΕVENT ABSTRACT
The public release of ChatGPT in November 2022 renewed interest in the automation of symbolic production. The possibility of watching an apparently unsupervised algorithmic machine produce different kinds of writing fired up the public imagination. The use of neural networks and other black-box artificial intelligence procedures for generating text is the latest attempt at abstracting and modeling the permutational and probabilistic nature of human language. In the first part of the workshop, I will revisit the literary history of algorithmic writing by focusing on three types of literary engines – combinatorial, hypertextual, and probabilistic –, which will be illustrated by selected examples spanning from the 1950s to the present. In the second part of the workshop, participants will be invited to try out freely available writing tools and reflect briefly about their assisted-writing experiments. Finally, the shortcomings of those engines as models of language, on the one hand, and their affordances as writing machines, on the other, will be discussed.
BIO INFORMATION
Dr. Manuel Portela is Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (English) at the University of Coimbra. His research focuses on digital critical editing, electronic literature, and comparative media studies. Those parallel interests are reflected in Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines (MIT Press, 2013) and Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities: Reading, Editing, Writing (Bloomsbury, 2022), in the PhD Programme in Materialities of Literature (cofounder and director), and in the LdoD Archive: Collaborative Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet (2017-2023), an experimental textual environment. He has also worked as theatre director, cultural programmer, curator, and translator.
