Benjamin Laird

I am a PhD candidate in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University based in Melbourne, Australia. My research is in biographical poetry in print and programmable media. My PhD project, The Code of Things, involves a creative component—poetry in print and programmable media—and an exegesis.

My undergraduate degrees are in engineering and computer science from Swinburne and an honours year in creative writing at RMIT University. My honours exegesis, (en)coded poetry: read, write, execute (PDF), concerned the relationship between code and poetry and involved the creation of poems.

I have worked as IT support, a puppet animation technician, a front-end web developer, and a web application developer and I currently support and (re)write code for the Overland literary journal and Cordite Poetry Review websites.

My essays, posts, and poetry have been published in various places.

In general, I am interested in digital poetry, poetry, metadata, the Semantic Web, Python, literature, publishing, ergodic literature, digital humanities and open source hardware.

(Source: Author's homepage)