Literary AI | On Literary AI

 Literary AI

 A Columbia RBML Exhibit 

 About 

 Exhibit

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 Case No. 8 

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 On Literary AI

 The Literary History of Artificial Intelligence is a collaboration
between the Columbia English Department, the Columbia University Rare
Books & Manuscript Library, and Columbia University’s Digital
Scholarship department.

 This exhibition explores the long, shared history of literature and
computation through the Columbia Library’s holdings. We present texts
that participate in early debates about whether writing was a skill to
be honed or a gift to be appreciated and whether the skills of writing
could be learned and even made into repeatable algorithms. Is writing
like any other craft that can be learned and taught? Following a
timeline from circa 1890–1970, this exhibition explores
professional manuals, devices, and techniques that promised to make
writing easier—and even to automate it. The Literary History of AI 
showcases examples of algorithmic composition, such as prose and poetry
written by machines, alongside literature written with the aid of
algorithmic and combinatorial devices. This exhibition broadly tracks
two broad stories related to the literary history of AI: production and
analysis.

 AI & Literary Production: Romance, Mystery, and Defense Aeronautics

 The first story follows experiments in the genesis of literature as a
professional and technical craft, facilitated by writing manuals, guides
for churning out mystery or romance plots, such as Wycliffe Hill’s Plot
Genies, and plot generators such as William Wallace Cook’s Plotto 
series. Automated text generation catalyzed a wave of early 20th-century
patents, from Arthur Blanchard’s “movie-writer” machine and Henrietta
Rose Montague’s “name selector.” Some how-to manuals incorporated simple
plot generators, with spinning devices or automatic number generators
that would guide would-be novelists past writers’ block. We follow these
professional how-to manuals into mid-twentieth century computer
experimentation in algorithmic and automated writing, from Christopher
Strachey, who wrote a love letter program in the 1940s, to Margaret
Masterman, a linguist who pioneered the use of computers to aid
automatic translation. The mid 20th-century saw an existential question
arise as to whether programs should be written based on frames or
grammar, a divide that drew much of its vocabulary from comparing
literary genres to linguistic rules. Were situational specifics or
universal linguistic structures the better way to teach text-generating
computers to write? This debate would influence early experiments with
chat bots, baseball analytics, defense training programs, and
match-making algorithms.

 The Literary History of AI showcases how early 20th-century popular
texts for aspiring screenplay writers, romance novelists, and pulp
fictioneers influence and shape contemporary, machine learning-based
tools used in automating aviation accident reports and defense
logistics.

 AI & Literary Analysis: Character types, story pieces, chat bots, and medical care

 The second story tracks the use of algorithms to analyze literature,
highlighting works such as Columbia alumna Harriot Fansler’s dissection
of Types of Prose Narratives, which she called a “textbook for the
story writer” to Georges Polti’s Les trente-six situations dramatiques 
(1895), which categorized what he theorized were the 36 timeless
situations that structured human experience, from vengeance and
retribution to love and sacrifice. This section of the exhibition
includes analyses and compendia of folk tales, diagrams of plot
structures, including Harry Stephen Keeler’s “web-word” designs, and
Carolyn Well’s distillation of the mystery novel.

 The interest in narrative analysis and plot visualization also catalyzed
the development of new techniques for organizing story elements.
Databases, scrapbooks, and notecards forecast zettelkasten, Evernote,
and Google Docs. Information storage was increasingly understood to be
central both to analysis and to composition. These materials illustrate
how early twentieth-century techniques used to generate prose were
paralleled by advances in natural language processing, which today
animate narratively “intelligent” bots such as Apple’s Siri and
Amazon’s Alexa , as well as influence interactive and automated forms
of medical diagnostics.

 Literary AI

 The Literary History of Artificial Intelligence is a collaboration between the Columbia English Department, the Columbia University Rare Books & Manuscript Library, and Columbia University's Digital Scholarship department.

 © Copyright 2022, Columbia University Libraries. Contents offered with a CC-BY 4.0 International License

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