Computer-Generated Stories, Jokes, Poems and Bots: No Programming Required!

Mainstream attention on computer-generated text focuses on its supposed ability to supplant the professional writer. In this workshop, we'll learn the truth: computer-generated text can be useful, but it's far more interesting as a creative and poetic tool, to create and thereby investigate absurd juxtapositions, poised on the brink of the infinite void of nonsense. We'll learn a tool called Tracery (created by Kate Compton), a freely available tool that makes it easy to create expressive text generators—with no prior knowledge of computer programming. (If you do know how to program, good news: there are open source libraries for incorporating Tracery grammars into your own programs.)