Open Transcripts

Bot Summit 2014 (Page 1 of 2)

Publishing and Preserving Bots

presented by Leonardo Flores

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?

Selfhood and the Icon

presented by Everest Pipkin

Like mito­sis, a copy has the capac­i­ty for indi­vid­ual muta­tion but does not intrin­si­cal­ly affect its par­ent. A retweet of infor­ma­tion is not a dupli­ca­tion nor a shift in scale. A retweet impacts a struc­tur­al bridge of a net­worked idea, not the intrin­sic idea itself.

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. 

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