CODE + CULTURE

March 29, 2024

TWO EVENTS FEATURING SCHOLARS FROM DARTMOUTH COLLEGE DEMONSTRATING THE CONFLUENCE OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, CREATIVE WRITING, AND CULTURAL HISTORY

How can the humanities help us understand AI? In two interactive events – a poetry workshop and a scholarly lecture – a team of Dartmouth College scholars demonstrates the confluence of computer science, creative writing, and cultural history.

Contact
Dr. Carie Schneider
Associate Professor
Department of Communication, English and Foreign Languages
cschneid@cameron.edu

FUNDING PROVIDED BY CU LECTURES & CONCERTS COMMITTEE AND THE HELEN C. SCHUTZ ENDOWED LECTURESHIP IN ENGLISH.

POETIC DIGITAL DEFAMILIARIZATION

Facilitated by Rena Mosteirin, Dartmouth College

1:00pm, Ross Hall 100 computer lab, with reception to follow in Ross Hall Lobby

This workshop aims to get you comfortable using digital tools for creative textual defamiliarization. When you defamiliarize language you create new poetic possibilities. We will begin with a canonical text, use several free on-line text mining tools, such as Google Translate and n+7, and then create poems from what we generate. This is your time to play! Enjoy the weirdness and confusion that results from transforming a text. We will also address ways you can use these tools to revise your own work. 

Rena J. Mosteirin is a lecturer in the Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program at Dartmouth College. Her most recent book, Experiment 116—out now from Counterpath Press—is a book of experimental poetry that sets out an argument for a global refugee idiolect. She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Her novella Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008) won the Kore Press Short Fiction Award, judged by Lydia Davis. Her chapbook Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) explores Moby-Dick through erasure poetry. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review and elsewhere in print and on-line. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, NH. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and earned her MFA at the Bennington Writing Seminars. 

 “A Short History of Artificial Intelligence and the Automation of Vision and Text Production”

Dr. James E. Dobson, Dartmouth College

7:00pm, Shepler Ballroom, with reception to follow

Today’s most advanced neural networks for text processing and generation and sophisticated image-analysis methods originate in 1950s and ’60s Cold War culture—and many biases and ways of understanding the world from that era persist along with them. Aerial surveillance and reconnaissance shaped all of the technologies that we now refer to as computer vision, including facial recognition. These histories are inextricably intertwined with the algorithms, people, and politics at the core of some of the most exciting and pernicious technologies of the present. This talk draws on the research in The Birth of Computer Vision to draw compelling connections between these histories of machine learning and the algorithms and tools shaping the world today, posing questions about authorship, authenticity, and autonomy in the era of AI.

James E. Dobson is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America (Palgrave, 2017), an account of the role communication and transportation technologies played in nineteenth-century American literature and Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (University of Illinois Press, 2019), a meta-critical and theoretical account of the methods of the digital humanities. He is also the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019). The Birth of Computer Vision (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), his most recent book, concerns the cultural and intellectual history of machine learning and computer vision.