Am I in AI?

I’m a member of the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). They collect money for “secondary uses” of publications – such as photocopies, digital reproduction and educational recordings. These rights bring in only small amounts of money, so authors don’t usually take the effort to collect them. Nor do they know how to do this.…More

Easy reading

I am reviewing my early blog posts Richard on the Holodeck and Shallow reading from February 2013. In the first post I noted that some people see literature (e.g. a novel by Charlotte Bronte) as a substitute for living the lives of the characters. In Hamlet on the Holodeck Janet Murray seems to suggest that…More

AI does history

I’m revisiting older blog posts. I’m up to the one titled “Loose ends,” which reflects on the nature of origin stories in the age of the Internet. The post from 2013, mentioned horsemeat detected in hamburgers, Derrida on the desire for beginnings, and Freud on red threads in naval ropes. I have recently traced a…More

Faroese chain dancing

I’m just back from a short break in the Faroe Islands. One evening I was standing in the reception area of our hotel when I heard the faint sound overhead of robust voices in unison accompanied by the slow rhythm of what seemed like feet stamping on the floor. The next day we were at…More

Vintage futures

I’m continuing the theme from the last post of looking back and looking forward. To that end I am reviewing the next set of posts authored in 2012. I start with the romance with digital technologies as they were then. When I wrote Vitruvius does steampunk in 2012, I was interested in how steampunk revelled in retro-futurism:…More

A digital time capsule

I’m looking back at old blog posts and publications. In 2012 I was also looking back to older studies, e.g. to 1994. See the 2012 post: “What’s a modem?” I’m indebted to ChatGPT for suggesting that the 2012 post served as a “time capsule.” In that post I revisited our 1994 study of computer-mediated communication…More

ChatGPT as trickster

As I continue to trawl through earlier blog posts I see that one of my 2012 posts followed a one week sojourn in Iceland. Iceland’s traditional narratives and mythologies draw on the activities of a pantheon of heroes, one of whom is the trickster god Loki. In that post, and subsequent publications, I referenced Lewis…More

Adaptive re-use of digital content

I’m in a cottage in the countryside. There’s an attic, a shed, a greenhouse, old gardening tools and furniture. Such legacy paraphernalia and economic necessity invite strategies of repair and re-use — practices that spill into the intellectual sphere. I’m re-using earlier blog posts. These posts were published between March and May 2012, beginning with…More

Pause for effect

I have been blogging about text-to-speech and voice cloning apps. I’ve also been turning compilations of my posts into audio files using Speechify suitable for podcasting. (See previous posts.) It seems the TTS (text-to-speech) tools I am using do not accommodate TTS HTML or other reliable means of introducing intonations and pauses into the readings.…More

2011 and all that

I am reviewing my early blog posts on technology, media and culture. The compilation here includes weekly posts between 9 April and 31 December 2011. The posts make reference to “actual events” that year. These include: Apple’s iPad 2 release; the impact of social media in the January “Arab Spring”; Osama Bin Laden’s death; the…More