A.1 Random Sentences

The full list of random sentences used by pata.physics.wtf for the top and bottom banners on each page (see screenshot 10.1).

• in posthumous collaboration

• the decomposing brain goes on working after death and it is its dreams that are Paradise

• plagiarism by anticipation

• the applause of silence is the only kind that counts

• to understand pataphysics is to fail to understand pataphysics

• duration is the transformation of a succession into a reversion

• god is the tangential point between zero and infinity

• laughter is born out of the discovery of the contradictory

• ha ha

• the aesthetic of formal constraint

• the unique imaginary solution to the absence of problems

• the contemporary relationship between science and poetry

• a huge and elaborately constructed hoax

• only those who attempt the absurd achieve the impossible

• the random is opposed to the deterministic

• pure multiplicity irreducible to any other sort of unity

• persistence and perseverance to buttress a fleeting existence

• enfolding a subject laterally, associatively

• a doctrine of correspondences, counterpoised by the exotic charm of another system of thought

• double negative is necessary to stop the mind believing

• the absence of contradictory evidence is not proof of a theory’s validity

• very wrong in very important ways

• no one point of view is final

• unification of opposites

• an athletic aesthetics of intuitive and instantaneous judgements

• constantly diverted from any objective by the very progress which their energy sustains

• imagination envisions the reconciliation of the individual with the whole

• behind the illusion lies knowledge

• a biomolecular bibliomecha of breathtaking beauty

• indubitably coherent yet absolutely nonsensical

• stylistic and formal experimentation can not be dismissed as purely apolitical

• variable phoneme sequences in suspension within a cloud of relative

• epi-cultural etymologies

• speculative solutions for imaginary problems

• nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found the point of view from which it makes sense

• laughter is the discord between tensions being resolved

• read with intention to rewrite

• a fractal geometry of momentums

• minimizing energy, crystallizing latent structure, pleasure is understood as a practice, and accumulates as experience

• don’t fall out of love

• the ‘something like’, the pseudo

• the text transforms itself as soon as it is understood

• adaptation of archaic mental structures to new environments

• a beautifully controlled yet hideously wasteful catastrophe

• driven by compulsive urgency to constantly reconceive the whole idea

• writing the unrightable wrongs

• prisoners of conscience

• machina sapiens negotiating the transformation of what is mortal into what is immortal

• database hyper-archive applications stimulating relaxation

• smelling of the rain it falls on the way down

• a thousand ways to greet the dawn

• how far up the chain can you put this without ambiguity

• a gentle kitten is licking the inside of my heart

• was this constrained by you, or restrained by the concept

• adjoining always antiquated permutation

• joint ventures can go too far away

• nowhere to be found here and elsewhere

• engender links to a balancing veneration

• coerce to do as a sizeable unprocessed primer

• plain up be a best concoction in the words

• the farcical pandemonium of technology

• it is not true that there were any nails

• this discovery opens the door into a completely new anti-world

• extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics

• turn the world upside down and inside out

• the law of the ascension of a vacuum toward a periphery

• the anti-world God not only plays dice, he spells his name backwards

• in the absence of a butler, where does the gun fit in

• space is defined by simultaneity

• time is a flowing stream, a liquid in uniform rectilinear motion

• space is a solid, a rigid system of phenomena

• the deceleration of our habitual duration conserved by inertia

• a perfect elastic solid

• movement into the past consists in the perception of the reversibility of phenomena

• relativity is absolute

• all observations depend on viewpoint and the scale of the scientist

• the clinamen, subjective viewpoint and anthopocentrism all rolled into one

• the identity of opposites

• making negatives do the work of positives

• in this year eighteen hundred and ninety-eight

• the twenty-seven equivalents

• the virgin, the bright, and the beautiful today

• the fifth letter of the first word of the first act

• voices asymptotic towards death

• an epiphenomenon is that which is superinduced upon a phenomenon

• concerning the amorphous isle

• like soft coral, amoeboid and protoplasmic

• searching desperately under the quinuncial trees for the venerable absent one

• the night computed its hours

• a remarkable epizootic disease

• the eternal nothingness

• love looks exactly like an iridescent veil and assumes the masked face of a chrysalis

• in a telepathic letter

• homo est deus

• ∞ -0 -a + a + 0 = ∞

• with the aim of computing the qualities of the French

• the inferno of subjectivity

A.2 Heisenberg Quote

The overly forceful insistence on the difference between scientific and artistic cognition quite likely derives from the incorrect notion that concepts are firmly attached to ‘real objects’, as if words had a completely clear and definite meaning in their relationship to reality and as if an accurate sentence, constructed from those words, could deliver an intended ‘objective’ factual situation to a more or less absolute degree. But we know, after all, that language too only grasps and shapes reality by turning it into ideas, by idealizing it. Language, too, approaches reality with specific mental forms about which we do not know right away which part of reality they can comprehend and shape. The question about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ may indeed be rigorously posed and settled within an idealization, but not in relation to reality. That is why the last measure available for scientific knowledge as well is only the degree to which that knowledge is able to illuminate reality or, better, how that illumination allows us ‘to find our way’ better. And who could question that the spiritual content of a work of art too illumines reality for us and makes it translucent? One must come to terms with the fact that only through the process of cognition itself can we determine what we are to understand by ‘cognition’. That is why any genuine philosophy, too, stands on the threshold between science and poetry.

(Heisenberg 1942)

A.3 Digital Humanities Methodology Field Map

The full Field map of digital humanities: emerging methods and genres by Burdick et al. (2012).

• enhanced critical curation

  • digital collections

  • multimedia critical editions

  • object-based argumentation

  • expanded publication

  • experiential and spatial

  • mixed physical and digital

• augmented editions and fluid textuality

  • structured mark-up

  • natural language processing

  • relational rhetoric

  • textual analysis

  • variants and versions

  • mutability

• scale: the law of large numbers

  • quantitative analysis

  • text-mining

  • machine reading

  • digital cultural record

  • algorithmic analysis

• distant/close, macro/micro, surface/depth

  • large-scale patterns

  • fine-grained analysis

  • close reading

  • distant reading

  • differential geographies

• cultural analytics, aggregation, and data-mining

  • parametrics

  • cultural mash-ups

  • computational processing

  • composite analysis

  • algorithm design

• visualization and data design

  • data visualization

  • mapping

  • information design

  • simulation environments

  • spatial argument

  • modelling knowledge

  • visual interpretation

• locative investigation and thick mapping

  • spatial humanities

  • digital cultural mapping

  • interconnected sites

  • experimental navigation

  • geographic information systems (GIS)

  • stacked data

• the animated archive

  • user communities

  • permeable walls

  • active engagement

  • bottom-up curation

  • multiplied access

  • participatory content creation

• distributed knowledge production and performative access

  • global networks

  • ambient data

  • collaborative authorship

  • interdisciplinary teams

  • use as performance

  • crowd-sourcing

• humanities gaming

  • user engagement

  • rule-based play

  • rich interaction

  • virtual learning environments

  • immersion and simulation

  • narrative complexity

• code, software, and platform studies

  • narrative structures

  • code as text

  • computational processes

  • software in a cultural context

  • encoding practices

• database documentaries

  • variable experience

  • user-activated

  • multimedia prose

  • modular and combinatoric

  • multilinear

• repurposable content and remix culture

  • participatory Web

  • read/write/rewrite

  • platform migration

  • sampling and collage

  • meta-medium

  • inter-textuality

• pervasive infrastructure

  • extensible frameworks

  • heterogeneous data streams

  • polymorphous browsing

  • cloud computing

• ubiquitous scholarship

  • augmented reality

  • web of things

  • pervasive surveillance and tracking

  • ubiquitous computing

  • deterritorialization of humanistic practice

A.4 Penn Treebank

The full list of POS tags mentioned in chapter 6.2.2 (Marcus, Santorini, and Marcinkiewicz 1993).

CC

Coordinating conjunction

CD

Cardinal number

DT

Determiner

EX

Existential there

FW

Foreign word

IN

Preposition/subordinating conjunction

JJ

Adjective

JJR

Adjective, comparative

JJS

Adjective, superlative

LS

List item marker

MD

Modal

NN

Noun, singular or mass

NNS

Noun, plural

NNP

Proper noun, singular

NNPS

Proper noun, plural

PDT

Predeterminer

POS

Possessive ending

PRP

Personal pronoun

PPS

Possessive pronoun

RB

Adverb

RBR

Adverb, comparative

RBS

Adverb, superlative

RP

Particle

SYM

Symbol (mathematical or scientific)

TO

{to}

UH

Interjection

VB

Verb, base form

VBD

Verb, past tense

VBG

Verb, gerund/present particle

VBN

Verb, past particle

VBP

Verb, non-3rd ps. sing. present

VBZ

Verb, 3rd ps. sing. present

WDT

wh-determiner

WP

wh-pronoun

WP$

Possessive wh-pronoun

WRB

wh-adverb

#

Pound sign

$

Dollar sign

.

Sentence-final punctuation

,

Comma

:

Colon, semi-colon

(

Left bracket character

)

Right bracket character

"

Straight double quote

`

Left open single quote

"

Left open double quote

'

Right close single quote

"

Right close double quote

A.5 Thinking computers

1. Can computers think?

   • Can computers have free will?

   • Can computers have emotions?

   • Can computers be creative?

   • Can computers understand arithmetic?

   • Can computers draw analogies?

   • Can computers be persons?

   • Is the brain a computer?

   • Can computers reason scientifically?

   • Are computers inherently disabled?

   • Should we pretend that computers will never be able to think?

   • Does God prohibit computers from thinking?

2. Can the Turing test determine whether computers can think?

   • Is failing the test decisive?

   • Is passing the test decisive?

   • If a simulated intelligence passes, is it intelligent?

   • Have any machines passed the test?

   • Is the test, behaviouraly or operationally construed, a legitimate intelligence test?

   • Is the test, as a source of inductive evidence, a legitimate intelligence test?

   • Is the neo-Turing test a legitimate intelligence test?

   • Does the imitation game determine whether a computer can think?

   • Can the Loebner Prize stimulate the study of intelligence?

   • Other Turing test arguments

3. Can physical symbol systems think?

   • Does thinking require a body?

   • Is the relation between hardware and software similar to that between human brains and minds?

   • Can physical symbol systems learn as humans do?

   • Can the elements of thinking be represented in discrete symbolic form?

   • Can symbolic representations account for human thinking?

   • Does the situated action paradigm show that computers can’t think?

   • Can physical symbol systems think dialectically?

   • Can a symbolic knowledge base represent human understanding?

   • Do humans use rules as physical symbol systems do?

   • Does mental processing rely on heuristic search?

   • Do physical symbol systems play chess as humans do?

   • Other physical system arguments

4. Can Chinese Rooms think?

   • Do humans, unlike computers, have intrinsic intentionality?

   • Is biological naturalism valid?

   • Can computers cross the syntax-semantics barrier?

   • Can learning machines cross the syntax-semantics barrier?

   • Can brain simulators think?

   • Can robots think?

   • Can a combination robot/brain simulator think?

   • Can the Chinese Room, considered as a total system, think?

   • Do Chinese Rooms instantiate programs?

   • Can an internalized Chinese Room think?

   • Can translations occur between the internalized Chinese Room and the internalizing English speaker?

   • Can computers have the right causal powers?

   • Is strong AI a valid category?

   • Other Chinese Room arguments

5. Can connectionist networks think?

   • Are connectionist networks like human neural networks?

   • Do connectionist networks follow rules?

   • Are connectionist networks vulnerable to the arguments against physical symbol systems?

   • Does the subsymbolic paradigm offer a valid account of connectionism?

   • Can connectionist networks exhibit systematicity?

   • Other connectionist arguments

6. Can computers think in images?

   • Can images be realistically be represented in computer arrays?

   • Can computers represent the analog properties of images?

   • Can computers recognize Gestalts?

   • Are images less fundamental than propositions?

   • Is image psychology a valid approach to mental processing?

   • Are images quasi-pictorial representations?

   • Other imagery arguments

7. Do computers have to be conscious to think?

   • Can computers be conscious?

   • Is consciousness necessary for thought?

   • Is the consciousness requirement solipsistic?

   • Can higher-order representations produce consciousness?

   • Can functional states generate consciousness?

   • Does physicalism show that computers can be conscious?

   • Does the connection principle show that consciousness is necessary for thought?

8. Are thinking computers mathematically possible?

   • Is mechanistic philosophy valid?

   • Does Gödel’s theorem show that machines can’t think?

   • Does Gödel’s theorem show that machines can’t be conscious?

   • Do mathematical theorems like Gödel’s show that computers are intrinsically limited?

   • Does Gödel’s theorem show that mathematical insight is non-algorithmic?

   • Can automata think?

   • Is the Lucas argument dialectical?

   • Can improved machines beat the Lucas argument?

   • Is the use of consistency in the Lucas argument problematic?

   • Other Lucas arguments

(Horn 2009)

A.6 Jarry’s Writing

A list of Jarry’s works in chronological order with their original titles copied from the French Wikipedia entry on Jarry (“Alfred Jarry” n.d.).

A.7 Leary’s Tables