The Digital Language Workbench

The Digital Language Workbench is an online platform for generating algorithmic poetry, computational literary experiments and conducting text analysis. It offers a unique visual programming interface to help writers combine different linguistic processors together with additional functions using an easy drag and drop editing tool. In general, the Workbench allows you to create, play with, and analyze language using algorithms and linguistic processors that you personally design and implement. For our virtual workshop, we will engage in a number of creative online writing exercises to explore collaborative approaches to computation and poetics. Participants will team up in an ongoing jam session to experiment and play havoc with readymade generative language processors and build their own with the program's drag and drop interface. The session seeks to explore techniques and strategies for designing new algorithmic tools in poetry and will culminate in a final open reading (along with an online publication) of new work.