We want to contextualize the bots for the audience of the ELC3, people who study and are interested in electronic literature. To frame bots as a kind of electronic literature. To link to the live bot on Twitter. But we also want to offer materials so those bots can be studied. We want to preserve it for future generations. So what does this mean, exactly?
Bot Summit 2014 (Page 1 of 2)
Publishing and Preserving Bots
presented by Leonardo Flores
The Top 20 Reasons Bots are Cool
presented by Ivy Baumgarten
I wasn’t really sure what to talk about and so a while ago I wrote this bot called Bots r cool to try to figure out why we all like bots, and this presentation is the top 20 of those off of Favstar plopped into OutSlide because I really just didn’t want to do any work at all.
Image Bots
presented by Beau Gunderson, Matt Schneider
Why did this happen now? We’ve had update_with_media on Twitter via the API since August 2011, so you could upload pictures for a long time. We got a “rich photo experience” in September [2013]. […] But the short answer is I don’t know why we’ve had this capability for a year and nobody’s done anything with it until now in terms of transforming image bots.
Bot Culture and the Myth of the Wacky Inventor
presented by Johannah King-Slutzky
The point being that this isn’t just some random thing about Rube Goldberg machines, it’s also about changes in art. It’s a broad pattern that happens whenever there’s a major technological shift, at least for the last hundred years. You get these useless machines that self-justify.
Reverse Engineering Netflix
presented by Ian Bogost
But most interesting was just going bonkers with this data in “gonzo mode” and incorporating as much as possible: Viral Plague Sci-Fi Movies Based on Children’s Books Set in Europe for Ages 8 to 10; or First Love Slice of Life Musicals Set in Europe From the 19820s For Hopeless Romantics; Bounty-Hunter Fantasy Movies Based on Books About Cats.
Fun With Corpora Manipulation
presented by Thrice Dotted
I guess the two questions that I ask myself when I’m making a bot are what resources and corpora should I use, and how can I manipulate this in interesting ways to come up with tweets that are more signal than noise. A lot of the time it’s actually really hard to generate language that is signal and not noise. And I aim to get a lot of signal in my bots.
Twitter Bots and Fair Use
presented by Tobi Hahn
I made a bot called @corruptum, and he uses a lot of copyrighted content in his corpus, so I was wondering whether it was legal and whether its use qualified as Fair Use.
The Lonely Project
presented by Lauren Hallden
You don’t know who they are. It gives you no handles, no identifying information, no location. All you know is they’re typing in English and that is how they’re feeling at this general moment in time. And then it just sends them this tweet. It’s one tweet over and over again: “Someone over here wanted you to know that you’re not alone.”
Translating World Clock
presented by Nick Montfort
I’m going to talk about a bot-like creation that was occasioned by NaNoGenMo last year, World Clock. It has a rather curious story to what’s happened after I developed it.