The University of Nebraska at Kearney’s new hire in poetry does not hide the fact that he started out as a hacker:
Poet Kwame Dawes shared selections from his collection of 15 published books along with the stories behind the poems Thursday.
“I learned to write for the theater by befriending all the janitors and security guys in the theaters in Kingston,†the former Jamaican resident said. “I couldn’t afford tickets, so the janitors would let me in so I could watch rehearsals.â€
Here is his poem “Storm” for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.
The important shift in this story is that people who want to make a high return on their investment are getting interested in pushing to make a sizable profit from the automation of language. The issue thus becomes whether pressure to build this new market will bleed straight into phishers and spammers who have already proven they know how to use automation to turn the news into easy money.
The few sports writers I read have a specific style and sense of humor. I’m not interested in the data on the game, since I could get that anywhere, but rather how they interpret and present the information based on their particular/unique view of the world.
Update: And in the end a computer that has a particular view of the world will still be just a shallow reflection of the person who programmed it. My presentation at BSidesLV 2011 (2011: A Cloud Odyssey) addressed this issue in great depth. I’ve been asked a lot lately to post the slides from that talk so I’ll upload them soon.
An album of Congolese artists is being produced by DRC Music, led by UK musician Damon Albarn. It seems to be in the vein of similar efforts such as Paul Simon’s Running with the Saints or David Byrne’s O Samba.
The question is thus whether Tout Puissant Mukalo, Jupiter and the Okwess International, Bokatola System, Evala Litongo, Nelly Liyemge and others will achieve greater international recognition, or is this really about Albarn? He did not use remote collaboration or cloud for the work and instead traveled in person with a huge crew to sit face-to-face and record and produce local sound in the Congo.
One of the strangest things I find is that Albarn lays down his fairly simplistic beats before Congolese sounds are layered over them. This is like an American executive from McDonalds traveling to France and telling a chef that they are going to “collaborate” on a meal by using the chef’s sauce on two all beef patties with a sesame seed bun. Albarn’s production crew could work on producing sounds and poetry on top but why take away the most important elements of Congolese music?
So the boring Gorillaz style of beat is what turns me away from the example above. Nelly Liyemge sounds awesome but totally out of place with the low-energy slow beat. Here’s another sample:
Boom, chick, boom, chick? The timeline should fade into the beat, not be the beat. It gets better after 30 seconds but still sounds watered down from the beats straight out of the DRC.
The above songs will be released on an album called Kinshasa One Two by Warp Records next month (October 3rd). They are said to be a benefit for Oxfam. Too bad Oxfam could not just release Congolese music directly to the world as a benefit. I wonder if they have to cover the costs of “production” by a large group traveling in person to Kinshasa, DRC.
Here’s a wonderfully complex soukous beat that Albarn misses completely in the above examples:
…not to mention street beats. Just about every song in the following compilation video, recorded live, puts Albarn’s production to shame. 5:18 is perhaps the most comparable style but on a whole different level:
Maybe Albarn just didn’t know what to do when he heard Congolese rhythms like the following drum line or maybe the project is really just about him being only slightly influenced by them:
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995