Agenda

Topics for 2018-2019

Sessions à la carte, open to anyone, no previous knowledge necessary, focus on Oulipo-based recipes around processes and practises of machine learning, with the aim to play, write, enjoy, enhance.

Past Meetings

• Friday 13 December 2019 10-18h: Constant studio, Hacktiris, 6th floor, rue Paul Delvaux 3, 1000 Brussels; Experiment and test on Bert, preparation of MDL exhibition in 2020 https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/191213_algolit

• Wednesday 20 November 2019 10-18h: Constant studio, Hacktiris, 6th floor, rue Paul Delvaux 3, 1000 Brussels; experiments, tests & reading on Propaganda, Racism detection, Ecological Footprint detection https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/191120_algolit

• Friday 25 October 2019: Meeting at 10h in Constant studio in Hacktiris, rue Paul Delvaux 3, 1000 Brussels; notes: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/191025_algolit ; from 14h till 18h we were in De Pianofabriek to discuss 'Mise en Valeur et Omission', a text by Elodie Mugrefya
• Friday 21 June 2019: Algolit presentation at Re-Imagining AI in Basel
• Friday 24 May 2019 10-18h: Meeting/Presentation/discussion with Xiaochang Li in De Krook, Gent. Notes documentation: https://mensuel.framapad.org/p/algolit_documentation_190524 , note Xiaochang Li :https://mensuel.framapad.org/p/algolit_xiaochang_li_190524

• Friday 26 April 2019 10-18h: Workshop Allison Parrish in Mundaneum, Mons

• Thursday 25 April 2019 20h: Lecture Allison Parrish in Passa Porta, Brussels

• Thursday 28 March 2019 18h-22h: Opening Algolit Exhibition in Mundaneum, Mons. Meeting: Mundaneum - 76 rue de Nimy - 7000 Mons

• Friday 1 March 2019 10-15.30h: Algoliterary podcasts, in collaboration with Radio Panik. Meeting: Rue Saint Josse 49, 1210 Bruxelles.

• Friday 15 February 2019 10-18h: Perceptron physical game, developed by Jack Boyer (RYBN); look into basic Neural Networks. Meeting: De Krook, Miriam Makebaplein 1, 9000 Gent. Notes: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/190215_algolit_perceptron

• Friday 25 January 2019 10-18h. An’s house: Place du Jeu de Balle/Vossenplein 7, 1000 Brussels. Notes: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/190125_algolit_propaganda_detection_etc
  • the case of Propaganda Detection proposed by Hans on the mailinglist: https://www.datasciencesociety.net/hack-news-datathon-case-propaganda-detection/
  • reading the material for the podcasts that is already there. This allows you also to get familiar with the material and to add stories yourself.

• Friday 14 December 2018 10:00-18:00: Linear Regression as a Storyteller, based on documentation of last meeting, at house of An Mertens, Vossenplein 7 Place du Jeu de Balle, 1000 Brussels.Notes: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/181116_algolit_linear_regression

• Friday 16 November 2018, 10-18h: Linear Regression: introduction & algoliterary experiments. Constant wtc25, Tower 1, Bd Roi Albert-II/Kon Albert-II laan 30, 1000 Brussels. Notes: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/181116_algolit_linear_regression

• Friday 23 November 2018: Study day on the future of reading & writing, UGent, with lecture by Nick Montfort and workshop on algoliterary practises by Gijs de Heij and An Mertens

• 8 to 12 October 2018: Gijs de Heij and An Mertens offer a workshop at the Mundaneum in Mons with students of ARTS2, **Numediart and other schools, on the use of statistical machine learning models and archival materials for literary writing. The artists will propose existing tools and practices and Oulipian methodologies for the play of algoliterary writing games. Participants in the workshop will be able to continue developing their works after the workshop week, and participate in the exhibition that Algolit will hold at the Mundaneum around March 2019. More information: Mundaneum_workshop

• Friday 28 September:Naive Bayes as a storyteller 10-18h, Brussels, Constant wtc25, Tower 1, Bd Roi Albert-II/Kon Albert-II laan 30, 1000 Brussels https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/180928_algolit_naive_bayes
  • In machine learning Naive Bayes is a simple probabilistic classifier that is widely applied for spam filtering and sentiment analysis. Based on the documentation of the previous session, we now use this technique as a recipe for potential literary creation - that can be physical, computational or analogical.

• Friday 8 June, 10-18h, Brussels, Constant wtc25, Tower 1, Bd Roi Albert-II/Kon Albert-II laan 30, 1000 Brussels. Notes: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/180608_algolit_naive_bayes

• Saturday 26 May, 10-18h, Brussels, Muntpunt: Algoliterator

• Friday 4 May, 10-18h, Brussels, Constant wtc25, Tower 1, Bd Roi Albert-II/Kon Albert-II laan 30, 1000 Brussels. Notes of today: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/180504_algolit_tfidf

• Friday 13 April, 10-18h, Brussels, Constant wtc25, Tower 1, Bd Roi Albert-II/Kon Albert-II laan 30, 1000 Brussels Notes of today: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/130418_algolit_word2vec2

• Friday 17 March, 10-18h, Rotterdam, Varia, Gouwstraat 3, 3082BA Rotterdam : word2vec, hosts Manetta & Cristina. This session will take place in the context of Algologs: a small event around algorithmic practices. For more information see http://varia.zone/en/algologs.html. - Notes from Friday evening: https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/algologs, Notes of the Algolit session on Saturday: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/180317_algolit_word2vec

• Friday 2 March, 10-18h, Brussels, Constant wtc25, Tower 1, Bd Roi Albert-II/Kon Albert-II laan 30, 1000 Brussels, host: An; Notes can be found here: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/180301_algolit_datasets

• Friday 9 February 10-18h: Variations on a Glance II: http://constantvzw.org/site/Variations-on-a-Glance-II,2920.html. Notes can be found here: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/algoliterary.workshop.a-glance.2

Topics for 2016-2017

Here you find a list of topics we're interested to work on: algolit encounters

• 9-12 November 2017: Algoliterary Encounter

In the framework of Saison Numérique the Maison du Livre opens its space for Algolit during three days in a row. The group presents lectures, workshops and a small exhibition about the narrative perspective of machine learning models. These are selflearning algorithms based on algebra and statistics. They often function as opaque 'blackbox' algorithms, while they shape applications that are daily used on a worldwide scale, like search engines on the web, translation machines, advertising profiling, facial recognition etc.

Because machine learning is so present, the members of Algolit felt the need to distillate reading and writing experiments from it. By executing parts of their creation process in a literary context, they become more legible. It is way to experience a few moments that are usually hidden in the making of the model, and that co-design contemporary stories in the way they influence the organisation of information.

• Thursday 9 November 18h30: Opening exhibition with guided tour in Maison du Livre, rue de Rome 24-28, 1060 Brussels

• Friday 10 November 18h30/20h: Guided tour/Two lectures and discussion in Maison du Livre, rue de Rome 24-28, 1060 Brussels

Mike Kestemont (UA) on Generative Models and the Digital Humanities: Towards Synthetic Literature; Amir Sarabadani (Wikipedia Germany) on Wikipedia’s ORES-project See: http://www.constantvzw.org/site/Algoliterary-Lectures,2852.html?lang=en

• Saturday 11 November 13-19h: Workshop 'Variations on a glance' with Nicolas Malevé in Maison du Livre, rue de Rome 24-28, 1060 Brussels. Please register by sending a mail to an@constantvzw.org.

See: http://www.constantvzw.org/site/Variations-on-a-Glance.html?lang=en

• Sunday 12 November 12-18h: Workshop 'Towards Collective Gentleness?' with Algolit in Maison du Livre, rue de Rome 24-28, 1060 Brussels. Please register by sending a mail to an@constantvzw.org.

See: http://constantvzw.org/site/Towards-Collective-Gentleness.html

• Friday 23 May: http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/neural_networks_7

• Friday 21 April: http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/neural_networks_6

• Monday 20 March, neural networks continued. Notes: http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/neural_networks_5

• Monday 13 February, follow up on the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing course. Please make sure you watch the first two video's of the course on Youtube. The notes of this meeting are on this Etherpad!

• Friday 20 January - neural networks III Third meeting with the neural nets, in which we started to follow the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing course from Stanford, by Richard Socher (oa. CEO MetaMind). The etherpad with our notes is here.

• Friday 16 December - neural networks II Second meeting to dive further into neural networks. We took notes here.

• Friday 25 November 10-18h in Constant WTC, Tower1, 25th floor, Av Roi Albert 28-30 / Koning Albertlaan 28-30 (behind Gare du Nord): a first dive in neural networks and how we can get their process legible, visible, understandable. A.O. we'll build a neural-net dedicated computer / XMPP bots): http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/neural_networks_1

• Thursday 3 November 2016: we will start from Uncertainty Detected, a supervised machine learning script (using Python and Scikit Learn) that predicts uncertain sentences in scientific papers. By looking at the code and visualisations of the data, we will propose some concrete parts of the process for literary, textual and design applications. Hosts: Gijs & An

http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/algolit_supervisedML

• Friday 7th October 2016: set agenda & topics for 2016/7, Frankenstein Botparade: IRC bots using natural language techniques & publication (Piero, An), I could have written that: algorithmic writing/reading machine based on Pattern sentiment/opinion analysis (Manetta): http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/algolit_reboot

Topics for 2015-2016

Here you find a list of topics we're interested to work on: algolit encounters

• Saturday 23rd April 2016 : Introduction on Machine Learning Models by Yann Chevaleyre, professor and researcher at the LIPN laboratory at the University of Paris 13: http://lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~chevaleyre/pmwiki/pmwiki.php

http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/machine_learning

• Saturday 19th March 2016 10-18h : Detecting syntactic style with Freeling.

How the algorithms developed for DNA-analysis can be used for essential syntactical novel writing? Host: Olivier More info: http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/playing_with_style_and_freeling

• Tuesday 23rd February 2016 10-18h : Writing with Film

Build libraries of 'wordclips' / dictionaries based on fragments of movies. Rewrap content / text into movie vocabularies. Replay one movie in clips of the other. Host: Gijs http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/writing_with_film

• Saturday 30th January 2016 10-18h: Literary Python for Beginners 2: http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/Frankenstein_revisited

• Friday 4th December 2015 12-20h: Writing & reading machines

• Sunday 15th November: Literary Python for Beginners - introduction

• Saturday 30th October: Brainstorm on topics & tools - etherpad notes