Audio · 2019-11-16 · 52m · 6 moments

Tech Talk: Beautiful and Useless Coding with Allison Parrish

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Generative Art involves using the tools of computation to creative ends. Adam talks to Allison Parrish about how she uses word vectors to create unique poetry. Word vectors represent a fundamentally new tool for working with text. Adam and Allison also talk about creative computer programming and building twitter bots and what makes something art. "Computer programming is beautiful and useless. That's the reason that you should want to do it i ✦ AI generated

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GUEST Allison Parrish

timeline · colored by role

Claim◆

Language needs to be destabilized and cut down to size so we realize the ways in which it is arbitrary, and computers are an effective tool for doing that.

Parrish explains her quote 'I want to punch language in the face with a computer' as a desire to use computational tools to destabilize language, calling attention to how language enforces worldviews and projects power.

transcript

Allison Parrish: One of the roles of poetry, in my opinion, is to sort of destabilize language or call to attention the ways that language shapes the way that we think, the ways that language enforces particular worldviews, the ways that language shapes the world... that ability of language to do things, to facilitate power, the kinds of power that I'm not interested in facilitating, that's the kind of language that I want to punch in the face.

Definition

Poetry is a form of language that calls attention to language's materiality and surface form, not just its semantics.

Parrish defines poetry as creative writing that calls attention to the materiality of language — what happens on the page or in the mouth when spoken — rather than narrative structures or underlying meaning.

transcript

Allison Parrish: When I talk about poetry, I'm talking about forms of language that call attention to language's materiality. They call attention to like the surface form of language rather than to just its semantics... poetry would be forms of creative writing that aren't about underlying structures of meaning necessarily, but are about what actually happens on the page when language is written, what actually happens in the mouth when language is spoken out loud.

explains mechanism · 1

Mechanism

Word vectors represent words as points in a multi-dimensional space, enabling mathematical operations like similarity measurement and analogy that reveal unexpected relationships.

Parrish explains word vectors as a way of representing words as points in multi-dimensional space, allowing operations like measuring similarity and solving analogies (e.g., France is to Paris as Germany is to Berlin).

transcript

Allison Parrish: A word vector is exactly that. It's like a way of representing a word as a point in space of some number of dimensions... you can say like, what are all of the words that are most similar to blue? And it would give you like green and sad and purple and sky... the big finding from the famous Word2Vec paper was you could do things like analogies, like the same line that connects France and Paris, if you transpose that line to start on Germany, the line will point to Berlin.

explains mechanism · 1gives example · 1

Example◆

Computational tools can reveal bizarre and unusual questions about texts and the world that other techniques cannot, by letting the natural affordances of computation lead inquiry.

Parrish describes how computation lets her ask unusual questions, like finding the average color of Dracula, by critically leveraging the affordances of data and computation rather than treating them as neutral tools.

transcript

Allison Parrish: That's the utility of doing these things computationally, is that if you're critical about what computers can do and about where these data sets come from, you can let kind of the natural affordances of computation lead you to these unusual questions that can reveal things about the world and about texts like Dracula... in that combination, in that synthesis, you can end up with these really amazing and bizarre questions and ways of looking at the world that other techniques can't do.

extends · 1gives example · 1provides context · 1

Claim◆

Computer programming is beautiful and useless, and that intrinsic beauty — not vocational utility — is the reason to study it, much like painting or origami.

Parrish tells her students that programming is 'beautiful and useless' — valuable for its inherent beauty and joyful intellectual practice, not merely as a path to a job or building practical applications.

transcript

Allison Parrish: One of the things that I tell them on the first day is, computer programming is beautiful and useless. That's the reason that you should want to do it. It's not because it's going to get you a job, not because it has a particular utility, but simply for the same reasons that you would pick up oil paints or do origami or something. It's something that has an inherent beauty to it that is worthy of studying.

Mechanism

Semantic word vectors work by building co-occurrence matrices: words that appear in similar contexts share similar meanings, though the dimensions themselves don't have stable semantic labels.

Parrish explains how semantic word vectors are built from co-occurrence matrices — counting how often words appear in similar contexts — and notes that the resulting dimensions don't inherently correspond to particular semantic properties but emerge from the dimensional reduction process.

transcript

Allison Parrish: The way that it's generally done is through co-occurrence matrixes. So it'd be like, if you go through an entire text, make a really big spreadsheet that has one row for every word and then one column for every possible context... if two words have similar contexts, that's like a key according to this theory of semantics, that those two words share a meaning... the dimensions don't actually mean anything on their own. The researchers have shown that some of the individual dimensions of the vector do actually correspond to particular semantic properties, but it's just sort of like an epiphenomenon.

explains mechanism · 1gives example · 1

Highlight slides

The Claim: Language Must Be Destabilized✦ from: Language needs to be destabilized and cut down to size so we realize the ways in which it is arbitrary, and computers are an effective tool for doing that.Why Destabilize? Language & Power✦ from: Language needs to be destabilized and cut down to size so we realize the ways in which it is arbitrary, and computers are an effective tool for doing that.Computation Leads to Unusual Questions✦ from: Computational tools can reveal bizarre and unusual questions about texts and the world that other techniques cannot, by letting the natural affordances of computation lead inquiry.Synthesis of Data & Computation✦ from: Computational tools can reveal bizarre and unusual questions about texts and the world that other techniques cannot, by letting the natural affordances of computation lead inquiry.Programming: Beauty Over Utility✦ from: Computer programming is beautiful and useless, and that intrinsic beauty — not vocational utility — is the reason to study it, much like painting or origami.

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