“Experimental Creative Writing with the Vectorized Word” by Allison Parrish
I’ve been a bit busy (more on that in future posts) but I had to stop and watch this talk by Allison Parrish about using word vectors for creative writing.
It’s a good introduction to both word vectors and some things you can do with them. Colors! Distributional hypothesis! Visualizing word vectors, which is a really neat way to learn about them!
The overall theme of the talk is about treating the written language as smooth spaces rather than discrete words, so you can do things like apply a blur to a paragraph. The analogy of a theremin for text is both a striking image and a call for a different kind of relationship with text, drawing on ideas from Amiri Baraka.
It’s especially worth watching for the poetry reading. The audible performance highlights how sound and the emotion are an essential part of language, yet tend to have less attention paid to it in some parts of the generative space.