From Literary Hub:
“I don’t do Twitter,” the poet Anne Carson replied baldly to my request for a comment. No great surprise there, I guess: many people feel compelled to avoid the site and its multitude of abrupt publications. It’s a timesuck, and a cacophony, with few genuine bon mots amid a relentless volley of reaction gifs. And it appears Twitter may not be around forever. Now in its tenth year, the company reported on February 9th that it had missed its targets for the fourth quarter of 2016, and shares in the company fell 10 percent in response.
I had emailed Carson to ask about a Twitter account with over 6,000 followers that is tweeting her translation of Sappho’s fragments, published as If Not, Winter. It is one of several successful bots—some true robotic accounts, and some that are accounts run by humans—publishing works of literature 140 characters at a time.
Linguist and programmer Esther Seyffarth defined a bot in a Medium post last year as “a program or agent that generates content and posts it to Twitter automatically, following some schedule or reacting to some trigger.” In the case of Twitter’s literary bots, or “corpus-fed” bots, programmers take a body of work—for example, the text file of War & Peace as it stands at Project Gutenberg—and build a program that “reads” the novel, 140 character at a time, “aloud” by publishing sensible whole-word extracts as tweets from a dedicated Twitter account.
To give an example, the code behind one such bot begins by breaking the whole text up into sentences. If a sentence is <140 characters, it checks if that sentence and the next sentence still come in under 140; if so it adds the next sentence and carries that on for as long as possible before tweeting it. When sentences run longer than 140 characters, the bot waits for a semi-colon, comma, or words like “and” or “but” (words the developer has listed in order of importance), then splits the sentence at the point of the pause and tweets the clauses separately.
@finnegansreader is a great introductory example of a literary bot on Twitter: it publishes extracts of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, 140 characters or shorter, in sequence. Liss Farrell was studying for a PhD at the Irish Institute of the University of Liverpool when she encouraged her friend Timo Koola to build the bot. She recalls: “I don’t think either myself nor Timo were expecting the Finnegans Wake bot to become so popular! I think I was doing my MA when I asked him about it on a whim—as he had set up the Ulysses bot, I guess there seemed to be an audience for it.”
What’s the appeal of a bot like @finnegansreader? Non-sequiturs, synchronicity, and the enduring Twitter-appropriate gift of brevity.
Link to the rest at Literary Hub
Twitter is antithetical to contemplation and long form reading, so I don’t understand the appeal of these bots. It must be to justify using the stupid site by saying, “I don’t have the time or attention span to read The White People, but by following @arthurmachenbot on Twitter, I’m still consuming literature. #twobirdswithonestone.”
And the poet mentioned in the article might be a natural at Twitter if she would just try, yes, but she wisely reserves her aphorisms for … HER POEMS. Why put so much thought and energy into crafting the perfect snarky witticism for Twitter.com when one can apply those efforts to one’s own work? And yes, it’s choice between working or tweeting. If one decides to make time for both, then something else has to give.
QotD:
It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
(Sounds like twitter and facebook to me!)