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 Writing Workshop: Human Powered Chatbox  A workshop headed by David Elliott and FutureFarmers in Baltimore. 17 people who were given simple rules for processing text and working together. This system created a writing machine that was connected to the internet. Source material was programatically mined from the Twitter and New York Times APIs based on feedback from the participant's input. The result was a chatbot running on twitter that could interact and respond to conversations online under the guise of a "computer simulating intelligence". Reduced to mere automata in the system, the participants could nevertheless chose to be either Computational Processors (whose job is to extract keywords) or Subjective Processors (who make a text using the keywords). After a message has been passed through the Computational and Subjective Processors, it gets uploaded to the internet where keywords are used as search terms on the New York Times and Twitter websites. The results of the search are returned along with any replies from people trying to talk to the Human Powered Chatbot and everything is copied down onto pieces of paper... and then redistributed to the Computational Processor to complete the loop. Inspired by A Mathematical Theory of Communication, an article written in 1948 by mathematician Claude E. Shannon. |
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