Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media at MIT, director of The Trope Tank, and president of the Electronic Literature Organization. Most recently, he organized and wrote 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, a collaboration with nine other authors about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program.
Authors | Nick Montfort
Articles on Amodern by Nick Montfort
THE COMPLEXITY OF POETIC PATTERN
Recreating Early Work in Machine Translation
A 1961 system by Victor Yngve, developed to be part of a machine translation project, produced unusual and provocative sentences. Although this generator was made for a utilitarian translation pipeline, it was eventually essentially claimed (although not by its developer) as an avant-garde poetry generator. In 2016, as an engagement with the history of computing, digital art and literature, and machine translation, I re-implemented this system in three different forms, including as a Commodore 64 BASIC program. I printed this program’s output on a dot matrix printer and presented it at a poetry reading; the three programs I developed were also made available as free software.
BEYOND THE JOURNAL AND THE BLOG
The Technical Report for Communication in the Humanities
The technical report is a low-profile but important format for the dissemination of information to expert readers. Developed in the 20th century, it became widespread after World War II. Thanks to the Web, it is now widely accessible. This article relates the experience of starting a technical report series for humanistic scholarship. It assesses the rigorous technical report, which is not "officially" published, in the context of the contemporary ecology of scholarship (books, journals, conferences, websites, tweets, etc.), raising the question of how journals should focus their efforts to best contribute to scholarly communication.