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"'Till Algebra is Easier —': Elements of Computation in the Poems of Emily Dickinson
In this paper, I present close readings of a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poems that I propose might be best explained through an understanding of her awareness of the current scientific topics of the time. These include, for example, the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, Faraday’s and Maxwell’s numerous investigations into electromagnetism in the early to mid 1800s, and the production of Babbage’s Difference Engine in 1847. Specifically, in regards to Babbage’s computing machine, I demonstrate a connection between some of the innovations first formulated by the mathematician and proto-programmer Ada Lovelace in 1842 and 1843, including concepts of looping, modeling, and isomorphism, and Dickinson’s poems, written more than one decade later, which include references to cycles, recursion, and branching. Additionally, I show that there are clear stylistic similarities between Lovelace’s philosophical inquiries into the nascent discipline of computation and some of Dickinson’s poems that might be said to contain algorithmic structures or images.
Hannah Ackermans - 14.11.2015 - 16:02
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Electronic Literature as an approaching tool to emerging ways of reading
What is reading? As a transitive verb, and in the strict action, it is to pass the view by the signs that we recognize from our mother tongue, written in a text to understand them and turn them into sounds. The act of reading goes beyond the interpretation of an inherited code. Reading is a cognitive visual/motor activity and meaningful of reality.
When we read a text, our thinking manages a bunch of received information that little by little it is organizing according to its maturity, experience, cognitive processes, intuition and conceptualization. The order in which it happens does not matter. What is important is the fact that when it is read, the construction and appropriation of both historical and a-historical concepts is happening. But, what happens when we read Electronic Literature?
Technology, following the proposal of Marshall McLujan, is an extension of our own body. For that matter, clothing is an extension of our skin. The shoes are an extension of our feet.
June Hovdenakk - 03.10.2018 - 15:21
