“The Literary History of Artificial Intelligence” is a collaboration between the Columbia English Department, the Columbia University Rare Books & Manuscript Library, and Columbia University’s Digital Scholarship department.
This exhibition explores the long, shared history of literature and computation through the Columbia Library’s holdings related to algorithmic composition, such as prose and poetry written by machines, alongside literature written with the aid of algorithmic and combinatorial devices. Following a timeline from circa 1890–1970, this exhibition explores two broad stories related to the literary history of AI: production and analysis.
The first story follows experiments in the genesis of literature by artificial intelligence or aided by algorithms. The use of rules and algorithms to produce texts had many practitioners in the 20th century, from Allan Turing, who wrote/generated programmatic love letters in the 1940s; to Margaret Masterman, a linguist who pioneered the use of computers to aid automatic translation; to the French literary movement Oulipo, which produced algorithmic poetry such as “A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems” by Raymond Queneau; and to Sheldon Klein’s automated folk tale and murder mystery generators in the 1960s–70s. The exhibition will also include popular texts for aspiring screenplay writers, romance novelists, and pulp fictioneers, culminating in contemporary, machine learning-based tools used in automating aviation accident reports and defense logistics.
The second story tracks the use of algorithms to analyze literature, highlighting works such as Analytics of Literature(1893) by L.A. Sherman; “Pattern Recognition and Reading by Machine” (1959); The Computer & Literary Style, A Computer Model of Conversation (1977); and Programmed Visions (2011) by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. These materials illustrate how early twentieth-century techniques used to generate prose were paralleled by advances in natural language processing, which today animate narratively “intelligent” bots such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.
This exhibition also includes student projects built in Dennis Tenen’s XXX class.
This exhibition is for artists, scholars, and students in the humanities interested in the relationship between writing and computing, as well as for students and practitioners of technology, in the fields of computer science and engineering, who are increasingly using the tools of computational analysis to both understand and to generate language. In welcoming together these often separated audiences, we hope to enrich both the study of the past and imaginations about the future overlap between literary production and AI.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Aafw_A4sJeRaZUNiU0HaxS72A_UAsN6-PY8RukPznBs/edit
“The Literary History of Artificial Intelligence” is a collaboration between the Columbia English Department, the Columbia University Rare Books & Manuscript Library, and Columbia University’s Digital Scholarship department.
This exhibition explores the long, shared history of literature and computation through the Columbia Library’s holdings related to algorithmic composition, such as prose and poetry written by machines, alongside literature written with the aid of algorithmic and combinatorial devices. Following a timeline from circa 1890–1970, this exhibition explores two broad stories related to the literary history of AI: production and analysis.
The first story follows experiments in the genesis of literature by artificial intelligence or aided by algorithms. The use of rules and algorithms to produce texts had many practitioners in the 20th century, from Allan Turing, who wrote/generated programmatic love letters in the 1940s; to Margaret Masterman, a linguist who pioneered the use of computers to aid automatic translation; to the French literary movement Oulipo, which produced algorithmic poetry such as “A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems” by Raymond Queneau; and to Sheldon Klein’s automated folk tale and murder mystery generators in the 1960s–70s. The exhibition will also include popular texts for aspiring screenplay writers, romance novelists, and pulp fictioneers, culminating in contemporary, machine learning-based tools used in automating aviation accident reports and defense logistics. The second story tracks the use of algorithms to analyze literature, highlighting works such as Analytics of Literature(1893) by L.A. Sherman; “Pattern Recognition and Reading by Machine” (1959); The Computer & Literary Style, A Computer Model of Conversation (1977); and Programmed Visions (2011) by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. These materials illustrate how early twentieth-century techniques used to generate prose were paralleled by advances in natural language processing, which today animate narratively “intelligent” bots such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.
This exhibition also includes student projects built in Dennis Tenen’s XXX class.
This exhibition is for artists, scholars, and students in the humanities interested in the relationship between writing and computing, as well as for students and practitioners of technology, in the fields of computer science and engineering, who are increasingly using the tools of computational analysis to both understand and to generate language. In welcoming together these often separated audiences, we hope to enrich both the study of the past and imaginations about the future overlap between literary production and AI.