Abstract
This chapter situates and considers several different facets of human computation in electronic literature and digital art. Electronic literature encompasses works in literary forms that are particular to the computer or the network context. Human computation is examined as an element of the development of collective narratives online, in which different roles are defined in architectures of participation. The form, structure, and common features of notable human-computation based artworks are identified. The human computation processes of collectively written and internet-harvested haiku generators are contrasted with each other to reveal their different models of situating the relationship between computational process and human authorship. Literary meta-critiques of human computation technologies such as Google’s machine reading of Gmail and reCAPTCHA’s use of human language recognition are discussed as electronic literature is positioned in a critical, if symbiotic, relationship to human computation.
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Notes
- 1.
The ePluribus Solver project (Greene et al. 2014) provides an example from the domain of collective journalism. Working with small fragments of a story in pictures using only a few characters or words, team members cast into descriptive and evaluative roles worked together to develop a collective narrative of the given situation.
- 2.
In his contribution to this volume, “Labor Standards,” Alek Felstiner (2014) begins to unpack some of the thorny conceptual and jurisdictional issues involved in utilizing a globally distributed casual labor pool for crowdsourced human-computation-based labor.
- 3.
Davis’s work was live until the early 2000s when the scripts driving the project became non-functional in the context of the contemporary Web. In 2012, the Whitney Museum restored the digital work, releasing both a “restored” historical version and a fully functional live version which allows for new contributions.
- 4.
See Rettberg (2010) for further discussion of this work and strategies for reading The Last Performance as text and collective performance.
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Rettberg, S. (2013). Human Computation in Electronic Literature. In: Michelucci, P. (eds) Handbook of Human Computation. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8806-4_17
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