Details

Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University
Dennis Yi Tenen
"Literary Theory for Robots”
[Response: Grant Wythoff]
Tuesday, March 05, 2024 @5pm ET
N107 (School of Architecture)
::Event co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Humanities::
Literary Theory for Robots (W.W. Norton, 2024) reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In this talk, we will discuss the past and future of literary technologies: the necessity of research into the material conditions of textual production, and the surprising afterlife of Structuralist thought. A case study from the book will conclude the conversation.
Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English at Columbia University, where he also co-directs the Center for Comparative Media. His research happens at the intersection of people, text, and technology. A long-time affiliate of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, formerly a Microsoft engineer in the Windows group and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, his code runs on millions of personal computers worldwide.
Grant Wythoff heads the graduate program of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton. He is cofounder of a cooperative mesh network and digital equity organization called Philly Community Wireless and founding editor of a journal for experimental research in the humanities called Startwords. His latest book, Technique in the Age of Tech (University of Minnesota Press), is forthcoming 2025.
Please visit M+M's official website for details and current information.