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The bot is an e-lit genre that goes as far back as 1966 with Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, a chatterbot that engaged users in conversation through text entered and displayed in a computer terminal. This concept informed interactive fiction from the 1980s and has breathed life into video game characters ever since. Poetically, bots are also related to generative works, producing poetry in many forms (haiku, couplets, sonnets, and more), techniques (n-grams, Markov-chains, templates, variables, etc), and datasets (self-contained, data mining, streaming APIs, user-generated, dictionaries, and more).
With the rise of social media, big data, and distant reading methods bots have become increasingly popular, markedly since 2012. A distinguishing feature of these bots is that they operate in real time, publishing content on a schedule or responding to specific conditions, drawing data from large and streaming datasets via APIs, filtering search results, reshaping or transforming it, and/or deploying its content through social media, blogs, or webpages.
For a chronological listing of bot coverage, check out the bot category in I ♥ E-Poetry or visit the Bots! Research Collection in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base (linked to below). See also the I ♥ Bots entry from the ELO 2014 conference.
Bots reviewed:
Chatterbot
- “Galatea” by Emily Short
- “glitch[META] ~(=^‥^) (@storyofglitch)” by @thricedotted
- @godtributes by @deathmtn
Dataminer
- “Pentametron” by Ranjit Bhatnagar
- “@HaikuD2″ by John Burger
- “The Longest Poem in the World” by Andrei Gheorghe
- “Tweet Haikus” by Brandon Wood
- “Never Forget Bot (@forgetmebot)” by Bradley Momberger
- “the way bot (@thewaybot)” by Eli Brody
- “Pizza Clones (@pizzaclones)” by Allison Parrish
- “#FalseFlag Bot (@FalseFlagBot_)” by Ben Abraham
- “Save the Humanities (@SaveHumanities)” by Mark Sample
Markov Chain
- “Bruno Latourbot” by Anonymous
- “@DeleuzeGuattari” “Rhiz-o-Mat” and “PoMoBot” by Anonymous
- “@KarlMarxovChain” and “@MarkovChainMe” by Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
- “What Would I Say?” by Pawel, Vicky, Ugne, Daniel, Harvey, Edward, Alex, and Baxter
- “10 Print ebooks” by Mark Sample
- “BillBlakeBot (@autoblake)” by Roger Whitson
Generator
- “Jorge Borges (@BabellingBorges)” by Matt Schneider
- “Kenosha Kid (@YouNeverDidThe)” by Darius Kazemi
- “Is it Art? (@IsItArtBot)” by Patrick Rodriguez
- “Why Can’t We Date? (@WhyCantWeDate)” by Patrick Rodriguez
- “Real Human Praise (@RealHumanPraise)” by Rob Dubbin and Leonard Richardson
- “NRA Tally (@NRA_Tally)” by Mark Sample
Mashup
- “Justin Buber,” “Kantye West,” and “Kim Kierkegaardashian” by Anonymous
- “Latour Swag” by Darius Kazemi
- #gifandcircumstance by Allison Parrish
- “Walt FML Whitman” by Mark Sample
- “@TwoHeadlines” by Darius Kazemi
- “Dreams, Juxtaposed (@oneiropoiesis)” by Allison Parrish
- “@AndNowImagine” by Ivy Baumgarten
Oulipian
Template
- “@Robotuaries” by David Cole
- “@Darius_at_GDC” by Darius Kazemi
- “Metaphor-a-Minute!” by Darius Kazemi
- “Rapbot” by Darius Kazemi
- “@tonightiate” and “@MassageMcLuhan” by Matt Schneider
- “DiGRA Themes (@DiGRAThemes)” by Ian Bogost
- “Snowclone-a-Minute (@snowcloneminute)” by Bradley Momberger
- @DependsUponBot, @JustToSayBot, and @BlackBoughBot by Mark Sample
Scheduler
- “@StarWars_tweets” by Anonymous
- “@everyword” by Allison Parrish
- “@IAM_SHAKESPEARE” by Joshua Strebel (read also March 2014 entry)
- “I AM THAT I AM” (@PERMUTANT)” by Zach Whalen
Responder
- “Knuckle Tat (@knuckle_tat)” by Matt Hokanson
- “Tats Illustrated (@TatsIllustrated) by Joel McCoy
- “The Answer is No (@YourTitleSucks)” by Jason Eppink
- “#FalseFlag Bot (@FalseFlagBot_)” by Ben Abraham
Bot-like
- @TweetsOfGrass by Anonymous
- “Times Haiku” by Jacob Harris and The New York Times
- “Postmeaning” by David Knoebel (part 1, part 2)