I really like that analysis a great deal--especially when you say the activity "challenges notions of authorship and creativity."

I get a little better regarding what you are saying about not being able to attribute meaning to the lines of the haiku now.

This is fun, Rochelle. Mind-boggling, huh? :)

Yes, that it is-- fun and mindboggling.

I even showed my blog and our class blog to a friend of mine in a very traditional (new criticism) literature program. Explaining how scholars look at elit actually helped me feel more authorative...

Thanks again for all of your input and help.

Well, after reading Ron Burnett's postings on our class blog, I emailed Peter Howard to let him know how much I enjoyed his works and asked if he would be interested in responding to my posts on his work. Here is a copy of the email I sent. We'll just see...

Hello,

My name is Rochelle Gregory and I'm a Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric department at Texas Woman's University. I am keeping a blog this semester in my electronic literature class, and I've included two postings on your haiku generator. I enjoyed your program and even fowarded the link onto several of my colleauges.

And, I was hoping you might be able to review my analysis and provide some insights into the program and commentary on my analysis of your work--especially as it relates to authorship and constructed meaning in electronic environments. I've read some of your other poetry and would find your comments interesting, particularly how you see notions of authorship and the intersecting roles of reader/writer/viewer.

The link to my blog is http://www.motime.com/myblog/edit/view/25491

Again, I enjoyed your work. And, if you are too busy to respond to my blog, I completely understand and wish you the best.

Sincerely,
Rochelle Gregory

Graduate Teaching Assistant
Department of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages
Texas Woman's University

Hi Rochelle

Yes, there are some interesting questions of authorship, I think. I should

say at the outset that I'm no expert on this sort of thing, and don't have

any academic expertise in the field, so what I have to say doesn't have any

sort of authority. I'm just the bloke who wrote the program.

I certainly don't consider the haiku generated by my software to be 'mine'

in the sense that a poem I'd written by hand would be 'mine'. But there are

certain constraints on the output of the generator that make any of the

haiku it produces influenced by me. First, the syntax of the sentences it

produces is constrained by the rules I programmed into the generator. These

are fairly robust, but limited. The generator will rarely produce a sentence

that is syntactically incorrect (though it does do so sometimes) but it can

only produce third person, indicative mood, active voice, present tense

sentences. This limitation influences the 'tone' of the resulting haiku.

(You may also notices that each line of any haiku it produces is a separate

sentence.)

Secondly, the tone of the haiku produced is affected by the vocabulary the

generator uses. As you've noticed, the syntax rules and the vocabulary are

entirely separate, and the user of the generator can select different

vocabularies. As the vocabularies were all selected by me, then I'm

influencing any haiku produced in this way. Though it gets more complicated,

because it would be possible for someone else to produce a new vocabulary,

so that effect of the syntax still derives from me, but the effect of the

vocabulary derives from them.

A third, and rather different way in which the output of the generator is

influenced is by the selection of haiku generated. (You may not think this

one counts, but I do.) Typically when people use my generator they don't

generate one, but several, until either they find one they particularly

like, or get bored. Clearly, when a user 'chooses' a haiku they like, then

the influence is theirs, not mine. I sometimes (not often, but it has been

known) get emails from people who have tried the generator, found one they

liked, and wanted to share with me. This identification of a 'good' result

seems to me to be the closest to being the author of a generated haiku.

After all, it's not entirely different from the way in which some poets

work: generating hundreds of drafts and choosing the one their aesthetic

sense tell them is the best.

On the other hand, choosing is what an anthologist does when she selects

poems for an anthology. We wouldn't normally regard the anthologist as

contributing to the authorship of the poems included. Though we would

acknowledge her artistic contribution to the anthology as a whole.

By the same token, selecting a vocabulary is a bit like using a dictionary

when writing a conventional poem. If my use of a dictionary affects what I

write, then clearly the author of the dictionary has had some influence on

the poem. But I don't think many people would argue that the lexicographer

has contributed to the authorship of the poem. Maybe they should.

I suppose an interesting, but theoretical question would be: Suppose you

were using my generator and it somehow produced a haiku of sublime beauty.

Who would own the copyright?

As to the point about meaning and whether the haiku have any, I think it

gets a bit philosophically deep. The sentence "John sat on the bed" seems to

have a pretty clear meaning, but suppose I wrote a sentence generator that

used the rules:

1) Choose one of the words "John" or "Susan".
2) Choose one of the words "sat" or "lay"
3) Choose one of the words "bed" or "floor"
4) Write down choice 1, choice 2, "on the", choice 3.
5) Put a full stop at the end of it. (I'm British.)

This could generate a number (8) of sentences all of which would appear to

make sense. It wouldn't be hard to extend this to hundreds of possibilities.

But the larger the vocabulary and the more complex the sentence structure

permitted, the more likely you are to generate sentences that look weird or

don't make sense. One of the things I was interested in exploring with the

generator was how choice of vocabulary affected the degree to which the

results appeared to have meaning.

By the way, there's another version of the generator on my site, which uses

Flash rather than Javascript. It's a little more stable and it's here:

http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/flash/haikugen.html

Hope some of that was of some interest. Thank you for your interest in my

haiku generator.

Cheers,

Peter

I've just picked up N. Katherine Hayles' book _Chaos Theory_ and _How We Became Post-Human_ and I see some parallels between what Peter is discussing and Hayles' discussion on chaos and order. While the haiku generator orders the words randomly according to a syntactic "master script," the initial word selection is random and chaotic. But, why does it make sense? Or, doesn't make sense? Why do some lines, if completely random, make sense while others do not? This seems in keeping with Hayles' discussion on artificial intellegence in _Post Human_. I'm still reading Hayles' books so I'll have to come back to this when I know more, I suppose.

I'm thinking of some of the points that Howard made and I'm just going to list some of the things that seemed interesting to me...

One point that Howard makes that is interesting to me is his slightly different take on my discussion of authorship and ownership. It seems for Howard, there is a joint authorship and ownership betweent the program writer (Howard) and the user. A dialectic relationship, if you will.

Also, this raises issues regarding the temporality of the poems created. After all, if the users can simply push a button and the haiku appears, then they can push another button and the haiku disappears forever. In this case, the text itself is dynamic and fluid. One erronous click and the most elaborate, brillant haiku is lost forever. As if it never happened.

This "simple" little program certainly raises many interesting questions.

I don't know what Hayles has to say about chaos theory, but I'd like to point out that, although the selection of words in my haiku generator is random (though constrained by certain rules), it is certainly not chaotic in the mathematical sense of the word.

Cheers, Peter

While I'm still working with Hayles' _Chaotic Theory_, I'm reading her discussion as one that looks for patterns in what would seem to be complex and nonlinear systems. Specifically, Hayles writes in her introduction that choaos theory involves investigating the nonlinear equations that "do not generally have explicity solutions" (11). Finding the order in what would be seemingly disordered data.

I saw the haiku generator as operating along some of the same lines. First, there is the overall structure of the generator (rules programed into the computer)--an overlying structure. But, in contrast to this structure is the random selection of words from the dictionary. The randomness and chaos of the program depends on the number of words in the dictionary. Just like Hayles talks about the ways in which scientists try to find a pattern in weather prediction, it all depends on the number of words programmed into the generator.

There is a finite number of words programmed in, just like a finite number of weather observations. The results are infinite, depending on a number of variables, just like in weather prediction. This is what I was thinking about in regard to chaos theory... But, I'm still wrestling with the theory so I could be off the mark, completely.

You have to be a bit careful with the word "chaos". Mathematics tends to appropriate words and then use them with specific meanings that are almost, but not entirely, quite unlike their conventional ones. "Chaos" is one of those. In non-mathematical language, "random" and "chaotic" can be near-synonyms, but in mathematical terms they're quite different. In fact I think I'm right in saying that a random system could not be chaotic, and vice versa. Both random and chaotic systems can be unpredictable, but for different reasons. Random systems are unpredictable because there are no rules for being able to tell from the current state what the next state is going to be. Chaotic systems are unpredictable (sometimes) because a very small difference now can make a big difference later on. The haiku generator is random, but not chaotic (in the mathematical sense.)

Peter

Thanks so much for the clarification. I see your point this time around...

I presume you're talking about "the butterfly effect" in regard to chaos and that makes sense.

Thanks again...