Friday, August 10, 2007

No more BOOKS????


I almost had a heart attack when I received Jeremy Hunsicker's email to SLed....some dude invented a Literature Factory. WOOT!!!! Then I read the fine print...this word-bot-thinger CREATES literature...without ANY human input.

Um.

Hmmmm...


Someone best wake up Walt Whitman, cuz' I think he is dying all over again...


So, I met Ciemaar Flintoff inworld and took a tour of the Literature Factory. It is actually VERY cool....it DOES work without human interaction, but the POINT is that the literature isn't all that good. What make Literature worthwhile to love?

SOUL...

and machines ain't got no soul...

BUT, it does show that language CAN use the same sort of computational structure as numbers...and that is a worthwhile lesson.

I was very impressed by Ciemaar Flintoff and the Literature Factory. Literature Alive! in Second Life endorses the project, as it makes students think about the HEART of writing...is it words on a page...or is about soul?

Wanna check it out yerself? The grand opening is Saturday 4pm to 6pm SLT at the Literature Factory at Kula 2 (189,9,25). Check out the wee bloggy, too: http://channel3b.wordpress.com

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This reminds me of the MIT students who wrote a computer program that wrote a nonsense scientific paper. They submitted the paper to a conference and it got accepted.
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#examples
-Hiro

Anonymous said...

Here's a great one that you could use in your classes.
postmodernist literary theory
-Hiro

jeremy said...

hunsinger... :)

-j