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Join us on March 17 for a reading and panel discussion of OUTPUT: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953-2023 edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort.
We’re thrilled to welcome authors Sofian Audry, Bill Kennedy, Erín Moure, and Darren Wershler for a conversation about the book and the fascinating world of computer-generated writing.
Copies of OUTPUT will be available for purchase, and there will be free giveaways of other books featuring computer-generated writing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nick Montfort uses computation to develop literary art. His work includes ten computer-generated books (in print from seven presses), the collaborations The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between, and Memory Slam: Batch-Era Text Generation. Among his MIT Press books are The Future and two co-edited volumes, The New Media Reader and Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. He’s professor of digital media at MIT and principal investigator in the University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative. Montfort directs a lab/studio, The Trope Tank, and lives in New York City.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An anthology of seven decades of English-language outputs from computer generation systems, chronicling the vast history of machine-written texts created long before ChatGPT.
The discussion of computer-generated text has recently reached a fever pitch but largely omits the long history of work in this area—text generation, as it happens, was not invented yesterday in Silicon Valley. This anthology, Output, thoughtfully selected, introduced, and edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort, aims to correct that omission by gathering seven decades of English-language texts produced by generation systems and software. The outputs span many different types of creative writing and include text generated by research systems, along with reports and utilitarian texts, representing many general advances and experiments in text generation.
Output is first and foremost a collection of outputs to be encountered by readers. In addition to an overall introduction, each of the excerpts is introduced individually and organized by fine-grain genre including conversations, humor, letters, poetry, prose, and sentences. Bibliographic references allow readers to learn more about outputs and systems that intrigue them. Although Output could serve as a reference book, it is designed to be readable and to be read. Purposefully excluded are human–computer collaborations that were conceptually defined but not implemented as a computer system.
More about the book here
This event is supported by the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur les humanités numériques (CRIHN) https://www.crihn.org/
March 17, 2025
4 – 6 PM
Milieux Resource Room EV 11.705