Assembly Lines: Web Generators as Hypertexts

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Assembly Lines Web Generators as Hypertexts

• Elizabeth Losh
• University of California, Irvine

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Creativity and Constraints

• To users, popular web-based generators seem
  both to create original verbal or visual online
  texts and to output data that conforms to the
  conventions of a specific and recognizable
  pre-established genre.
• Thus, web generators are both generative and
  generic.

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Church Sign Generator
Textual Pleasures Ever wanted to rearrange the
letters to make your own church sign? . . . Save
it, send it to a friend, put on your website, or
use it however you like. Enjoy!
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Web Generators and Social Subversion

• Other conventionally forbidden activities of
  defacement include writing on blackboards,
  painting graffiti, and giving women tattoos.
• Users are also allowed to personalize signifiers
  of authority, education, and privilege as
  visitors to put their own names on law
  enforcement badges, diplomas, military dog tags,
  and access passes.

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Boarding Pass Generator

Mirror sites, objections from blogging
communities proliferate in response to FBI raid
charging fraud and forgery
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Christopher Soghoian on the generation of names
on watch lists

• Sound-alike names
• 30,000 people who have requested that their names
  be removed.
• Insecure Flight Broken Boarding Passes and
  Ineffective Terrorist Watch Lists

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Deconstruction Engines

• Interactive hypertexts have the capacity to
  create texts that are readerly and non-linear.
• Organized by a rhetoric of departure and arrival

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Poetic Machines
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A Genre for Spontaneous Creativity and Play

• Chance operations and cut-up texts

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A Genre for Satire

• Theoretical, scientific, and aesthetic
  pretensions can be lampooned because generators
  output automatic or pseudo-random results.

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Postmodern Essay Generator
Inspired by the Sokal hoax, this generator
outputs prose of pseudo-postmodern
theory. Creator Andrew Bulhak compares this
simulation of scholarly prose to mental
debility or the ranting of a paranoid
schizophrenic street preacher, or perhaps a
USENET ranter or the text of eccentric
pseudoscientic/religious pamphlets.

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ELIZA
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SCIgen

The authority of supposedly peer-reviewed
scientific conferences is similarly lampooned
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Doing Things with Words

• Anthropological perspectives on magic and
  linguistic formulae
• Speech act theory

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Threats, Curses, and Insults
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Blessings and Compliments

""" Random Compliment Generator """ based on
the Random Insult Generator but modified for a
work environment pronoun 'you','my','thou'
verb 'hard working', 'forward thinking', 'fast
moving' doing words verb.extend('quick
learning', 'compelling','painstakingly',
'encouraging') verb.extend('amazingly'
adjective 'intelligent', 'smart' describing
word adjective.extend('vigorous','energetic','res
ourceful', 'thorough', 'meticulous')
adjective.extend('reliable','diligent','advanced'
) adjective.extend('avant garde','cutting
edge','revolutionary','dynamic') noun
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Name Generators
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Abstract Art Generators

Visual images can be generated as well as verbal
expressions Satire or homage?
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PHP Coding Communities

Attitudes about expertise and mentorship Attitudes
about ownership of intellectual property or
participation in a creative commons
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The Virtual State

Online forms and middleware applications
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Web 2.0 Generators
How do these compare to recent critiques in
print? Questions of form and function