ChatGPT Claims to Square the Circle
This is a transcript of a conversation I had with ChatGPT in which it claimed to have squared the circle. The bot persisted in asserting that a square with side length r has the same area as a circle of radius […]
Some GPT-3 Generated “Sonnets”
As an experiment, I asked the GPT-3 “text-davinci-003” model to write 20 Shakespearean sonnets on different topics. I’m interested in this because I’ve done some prior work on getting text generators to rhyme, and I wanted to see how well […]
New article in The Wordsworth Circle
My latest article is now online. Binder, Jeffrey M. “The Datafication of Culture: Romanticism and AI-Generated Poetry.” The Wordsworth Circle 53, no. 3 (Summer 2022): 354-73. This article discusses a machine-generated imitation of William Wordsworth’s poem Tintern Abbey, which I posted […]
A Machine-Generated “Tintern Abbey”
The following is a poem generated by GPT-3. The text in bold is the prompt that I entered; the rest was generated by a machine. I discuss this text in my article “The Datafication of Culture: Romanticism and AI-Generated Poetry.” […]
New article in Critical Inquiry
My first publication based on my history of computation project is finally out today. Binder, Jeffrey M. “Romantic Disciplinarity and the Rise of the Algorithm.” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 4 (Summer 2020): 813-834. Abstract: Scholars in both digital humanities and media studies […]
Artificial Versifying
In his 1677 book Artificial Versifying, the English mathematician John Peter describes a simple procedure that can be used “to make almost Six hundred thousand different Latine Verses.” By drawing letters from a set of tables in a certain pattern, […]
New article in Media Culture and Society
My latest article is out online today. Binder, Jeffrey M. “The Eighteenth-Century Elocution Movement and Facebook: Reading Emotion Before and After the Subject.” Media Culture and Society. Published online Aug. 18, 2019. Abstract: The rise of social media has recently […]
Homespring
Way back in 2003, I created Homespring, an absurdist esoteric programming language that has since taken on something of a life of its own. It attracted a bit of attention on the Internet in May, 2018, so I figured I […]
New article in American Literature
My paper about the Distance Machine is online now. Binder, Jeffrey M. “‘The General Practice of the Nation’: Walt Whitman, Language, and Computerized Search in the Nineteenth-Century Archive.” American Literature 88.3 (September, 2016): 447-75. Abstract: Word-search technologies have played a significant role […]
New article in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016
Now available online, accessible to all: Alien Reading: Text Mining, Language Standardization, and the Humanities. Preview: For all the talk about how computers allow for new levels of scale in humanities research, new debates over institutional structures, and new claims to […]