My work centers on playful ways in which machines can augment human creativity, whether by generating unreadable books, composing “poetry”, synthesizing photography, or providing new ways to tell stories. I’m an amateur researcher of 19th century utopian novels and have a lifelong interest in interactive fiction.
Procedural art & code
Seraphs: A mysterious codex
A computer-generated book based on the Voynich Manuscript.
Displayed at MIT Libraries as part of Author Function, a 2018 exhibit on computer-generated books. Featured in The Pacific Standard.
A Physical Book: Undigitization
Makes a digitized book “physical” by rendering it in a simulated space where properties like gravity, friction, and velocity are applied. Live demo Read more
The Days Left Forebodings and Water: Generated blackout poetry
Creates artwork in the style of Newspaper Blackout Poetry using natural language processing and optical character recognition. Featured on Waxy.org in 2016.
random.chance: Computer-imagined surrealist montages
Generated compositions that resemble photomontages in the style of early surrealists.
Saga III: Recreating the first computer-written teleplay
A reimagining of a 1961 computer program that generated the screenplay to a Western, filmed by CBS television. Source code and history of the project. Invited contribution to the Workshop on the History of Expressive Systems.
Color Problems
A generator based on the works of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842-1939), who hoped her original color analyses would inspire others to study “whatever originals may be at hand in books, shops, private houses, or museums.” A collaboration between myself and Mel Dollison to allow anyone to be inspired by her abstract, modernist style employed in the context of everyday objects and photos.
A Pickler for the Nowing Ones (2021)
A translator and generator to produce text in the style of A Pickle for the Knowing Ones (1802) by noted eccentric Timothy Dexter (1747-1806). The final output is an entry in National Novel Generation Month 2021.
No Solitude in the Caves of Spring (2017)
An alliterative poem by a neural net:
Ants and all ages are all about—active as buds are bound by black, bubbles burn by maple blackbird body, but burst before birds before building branches back. […]
Trapped in the Q (2016)
Generates an infinitely long story in the mode of the scenes in James Bond where Q introduces a series of increasingly-implausible ordinary objects that actually kill people.
emilyvanderbot
Generates abstract color tiles after Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s 1902 work on color theory. Featured in the New York Times (October, 2018). Create your own compositions with colorproblems.art.
soamazingquote
Finds tweets with inspirational-sounding messages and mis-attributes them to famous people like Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln.
i_luv_recipes
Picked a recipe, parsed its ingredients, and made random, usually revolting, substitutions, just like people who comment on internet recipes. (Now inactive.)
Interactive fiction
I publish hypertext interactive fiction using my open source framework Windrift, which allows for rich user interfaces and experimentation. As of 2022, Windrift is under active development and there are many example stories in the manual and in the Windrift Playground.
Harmonia
An interactive mystery, playable in a web browser, about utopian ideals and bookish delights.
Harmonia is one of those rare pieces of interactive fiction where the author has woven a unified experience out of crosshatched decisions in writing and systems design, with the weft amplifying and supporting the warp.
– Bennett Foddy, designer of QWOP
Best Use of Innovation and Best Use of Multimedia, 2017 XYZZY Awards. Finalist for Best Story and Best Implementation. Third place, 2017 Interactive Fiction Competition.
Stone Harbor
An interactive detective story, playable in a web browser. Interview about the development of the piece with Emily Short. Source code. Portuguese translation by José Carlos Dias.
Fourth place, 2016 Interactive Fiction Competition, and finalist for three 2016 XYZZY Awards including Best Writing.
The Ballroom
Modifying something that seems trivial can overturn the whole chain of events, adding entire stretches of paragraph to the page and radically changing the existing ones. — Interactive Licktion review
A short “mutable story” in which a complete narrative is always present but can be manipulated by the player in sometimes surprising ways.
Best in the Back Garden audience ribbon, Spring Thing 2019 festival
First Draft of the Revolution
A marvel—an exploration of the space between the mind and the page the likes of which I’ve never experienced. — Kotaku
An interactive epistolary story I commissioned from Emily Short. I worked on the design and implementation with inkle (80 Days, Heaven’s Vault)
Best Use of Innovation, 2013 XYZZY Awards.
Essays & tutorials
Natural Language Processing for Programmers
A series on learning to manipulate text with computers, in five parts:
- Introduction
- Generating text with context-free grammars
- Classifying naughty stories
- Developing world models
What we can do with “books”
What makes for successful digital-first literature: it must be immersive, non-trivial, and participatory.
Interactivity in EPUB 3
Covering embedding JavaScript and other forms of interactivity into EPUB 3 publications.
Rich design publications with EPUB 3
A tutorial for IBM Developerworks on using CSS3 media query, HTML5 navigation, and MathML in EPUB 3 publications.
Digital monograph technical landscape
A report prepared for the UK academic funding organization JISC on digital publishing, ebooks, and scholarly communication.
Independent client work
University of Pennsylvania:
Manicule (2018, 2022)
Manicule, developed under the direction of Whitney Trettien as part of Digital Book History, is an open source React webapp for exploring the physical structure of rare manuscripts. Scholars can provide page-by-page annotation both of the content, binding, and layout of notable volumes. Live demo
Creative Commons:
CC Search (2017)
The prototype for CC Search indexed a corpus of over 10 million publicly licensed images from museums, libraries, and individuals, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Europeana, and the New York Public Library. Coverage: Newsweek and TechCrunch. Technical notes
University of California, Davis:
Label This! (2016)
Label This!, for University of California, Davis, helps users explore and describe the library’s remarkable collection of historic wine labels. Based on scribeAPI, a Rails/React webapp that allows visitors to select and transcribe areas of interest on digitized material.
Media
On the Emily N. Vanderbot project in the New York Times (Oct, 2018)
Press release announcing membership on the Board of Directors of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (Aug, 2018)
Interview for Atlas Obscura along with other Interactive Fiction Competition winners and organizers (Nov, 2017)
Podcast interview with Harvard Business Publishing on artificial intelligence and machine learning for publishers (Oct, 2017)
Photoessay and interview in Topic about mentorship relationships among women (Aug, 2017)
Podcast interview for Moonshot on AI and machine learning (July, 2017)
Interview about the relationship between interactive fiction and AI, featuring Emily Short, Lynnea Glasser, and Bruno Dias (Nov, 2016)
Strategies to help introverts network (FastCompany, 2015)
Ebooks in the cloud (Wired, 2011)
Interview on “digital detox” (NYT, 2010)
Interview on the effects of the iPad on reading (NYT, 2010)