Utente:Lydia Tuan/Generative Literature: differenze tra le versioni
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Riga 32:
The dead. Here and there/
Will be found a utensil.|[[Racter]], "[[The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed]]"|lingua=}}
In spite of its popularity, the Cybernetic Poet was not the only poetry generator from the mid-1980s. [[William Chamberlain]] and [[Thomas Etter]]’s [[Racter]], whose namesake derives from ''raconteur'', is a [[software]] written in the [[Linguaggio di programmazione|programming language]] [[BASIC]] that generates prose on an [[IMS]] (Information Management System) computer without prompts from a human operator. A collection of Racter’s early fiction was published in a book entitled, ''[[The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed]]'' (1984), and aside from spelling mistakes corrected by Chamberlain himself, the text is completely computer-generated. Racter generates text from a database containing 2,400 words, matching nouns with contextually appropriate adjectives, and it ensures continuity by tracking used phrases,<ref name=":2">{{Cita libro|autore=Roberto Simanowski|titolo=Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations|anno=2011|editore=University of Minnesota Press|città=Minneapolis|lingua=en|pp=96-97|volume=35}}</ref> allowing the book to have some form of cohesion that we might call a narrative (even though there are human-drawn sketches that serve as visual aids that potentially contribute to this cohesion). Racter’s choice of words is completely random, producing senseless text that literary critic [[Jack Barley McGraw]] calls “empty text” resembling “[[Dadaismo|Dadaist]] nonsense” that cannot be close read. Any attempt at close reading Racter’s “disturbingly superficial” prose, according to McGraw, would be a
In the preface, Chamberlain writes that Racter’s goal is to “replicate human thinking” — or, in other words, represent a utopian actualization of the vision that certain people had for computers during the mid-1980s, precisely that computers were “designed to accomplish in seconds (or microseconds) what humans would require years or centuries of concerted calculation effort to achieve,” and, in some cases, were absolutely needed, as certain tasks could not be accomplished without the use or assistance of a computer.<ref>{{Cita libro|autore=William Chamberlain|titolo=The policeman's beard is half constructed : computer prose and poetry by Racter ; [the first book ever written by a computer ; a bizarre and fantastic journey into the mind of a machine]|url=http://worldcat.org/oclc/311319022|accesso=2019-06-02|data=1984|editore=Warner Books|lingua=en|OCLC=311319022|ISBN=0446380512}}</ref>
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