Creative Writing with Cozy Computation
Creative Writing with Cozy Computation
Allison Parish is a poet and programmer and joins BookLab for a digital poetry writing workshop and a talk. The workshop 2-3:30pm is going to be capped at 15 participants, but currently has a couple spots left. The main event is the talk from 4-5, open to all. In-person only, no zoom simulcast.
Talk title: Solar powered dawn poems: an experiment with radically small artificial intelligence (4 pm 2nd floor lounge)
Workshop title: Creative writing with cozy computation (2 pm Tawes 3134)
Workshop description: This workshop provides a hands-on introduction to creative writing with computational tools, with an emphasis on collaboration between workshop participants and “cozy” computation. By “cozy” computation I mean computation on a small scale: we will make use of small tools that are easy to use and explain, and that work well on low-end hardware. In particular, we'll learn about Markov chains, a simple but powerful algorithm for generating text. We’ll make use only of datasets that we generate during the workshop—no web-scraped data, no pre-trained machine learning models. The workshop begins with a free-writing exercise to generate a shared textual corpus (for use in the remaining exercises), and ends with the production of an online zine containing work produced during the workshop.