Literary Machines. A Critical History of the Automation of Reading, Editing, and Writing

Networked cloud-computing and screen-based media have become our major reading and writing infrastructure. Language technologies are part of everyday life as web-based applications in smartphones and other digital devices. Word processing, text-to- speech and speech-to-text software, voice assistants, assisted translation, generative text, and collaborative writing tools sustain a complex ecology of symbolic processes. The ubiquity of programmable media for symbolic action marks a transformation in which new theoretical questions become relevant for our lived experience. Literary Machines will develop a critical history of how reading, editing, and writing have been modelled in computational media. The project will examine the softwarization of the practices of reading, editing and writing through analyses of (1) computer-assisted approaches in literary studies; (2) computer-assisted approaches in
scholarly editing; (3) algorithmic writing and interface design as aesthetic media in electronic literature. Research questions will address (a) textual theories, (b) computational modelling, and (c) creative agency.

The project has three major aims:
(a) to identify methodologies and algorithms used in machine reading of literary works, and provide a critical analysis of their procedures for the datafication of text and a general theory of their models of reading;
(b) to gain an overview of how the modelling of literary works for digital processing and presentation in scholarly editing has evolved, considering data models, textual encoding, interface design, and social text affordances;
(c) to compare and synthesize existing histories and theories of programmable writing, especially within scholarship on electronic literature, but also considering theories from other disciplines, such as critical code studies and computational creativity.