I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, author and professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. I co-direct the Center for Digital Narrative, a 10-year Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence, and I lead the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life. This site started as my blog in October 2000.
Matt K.
What does it mean–shannonize? Something to do with ol’ Claude?
Jill
Yes, the communication model Shannon. It’s this complicated geeky game Noah told us about because he and some collaborators are planning to do a project using it. The basic form is that you pick a word at random in a book, and write it down. That’s word A. Then you look for the same word again, in the same book or another book, and you write down the word AFTER the word you looked for. This is word B. Then you look for another instance of word B and write down the word that happens to be after that, and so you keep going until you have a long peculiar sentence. Then you laugh.
With computers you can do the same with series of words, and it sort of rewrites your words for you. Strange. One of the sites that lets you do it is The Shannonizer Assault Team, but I’m not sure they’re using quite the algorithm Noah was talking about. Programs Noah mentioned that do this are Babble, which is a DOS program so hard to run these days, and Prate, which is also a download, but newer. I’ve not actually tried them myself, and there may well be others I missed.