WRT: Writer Response Theory

Bob Norris, administrator of the Bot Central forum, has renewed a monthly competition for producers of chatbots: The World Chatterbot Competition. This is the first monthly competition for conversational agents (that I’m aware of ), but surely not the first competition for chatbots or even other forms of elit.

Many readers of this blog would be familiar with the poem generator:?Gnoetry. It is, basically, a computer program with which a human collaborates to create new poems out of a pool of texts. It is a form of constrained writing and an experiment in human-computer collaboration.?It has been described and labeled in many ways, such?as […]

The flipside of Critical Code Studies (“more of us should read code!”) are initiatives like Microsoft Developer Network’s new Coding4Fun section (“more of us should write code!”) - although the gap between the rhetoric and the reality is hard to close. A picture of a child beaming at a laptop keyboard helps with the hard […]

Recently I talked about the idea of biowriting and the interesting category of DNA bioart. Here is one example of digital DNA biowriting in practice.

One of the central issues of representation in DNA biowriting is transcoding the alphabet into DNA. In digital DNA biowriting, this means transcoding ASCII or Unicode into the nucleotides adenine, cytosine, […]

So far I’ve tried to talk about different types of frustration and different approaches to the study of frustration in interactive media. But the elephant in the room is participant expectation.
The experience of frustration is inextricable from the expectations of the participant.
Participants coming to the same work with different expectations may have very different experiences […]