Entries tagged with knowledge base

May 14, 2017

Document 49: Poetics as Knowledge Base

Poetics as Knowledge Base:
The Example of “Plan B”

Presented at the Louisville Conference
on Literature and Culture after 1900
24 February 2017

This paper is a thought experiment that reads experimental poetry and poetics in relation to the concept of “knowledge base”—even as poetic attempts to create a knowledge base itself. The making of poetry has always been attended by some kind of “lore,” the necessary but often obscure or intractable set of background knowledges and beliefs that are crucial for its understanding—T.S. Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land or Louis Zukofsky’s parallel texts for “Mantis” are modern examples of this. Historicism in poetics depends on accessing and developing this lore, which it extends to more nuanced contexts; at the same time, theory-based approaches creates a metadiscourse of key concepts that may become part of the knowledge base of poetics. From the romantics to the postmoderns, the construction of such a knowledge base is a necessary entailment of “the making of the work in its condition of possibility”—the task of poetics as a discourse. I want to look at a range of ways this knowledge base is represented and accessed, from the archiving of writings in poetics to modernist and postmodern concordances to major works (such as Zukofsky’s “A”) to online poetry/poetics archives to recent experimental methods. What would a rigorous use of the concept of “knowledge base” in computing and information theory bring to understanding poetics in such terms? … More

February 7, 2010

Link 09: Content Concept

Midwestern Water Wars is an on-going wiki project to construct an evolving knowledge base of an apocryphal series of natural/human events in the mid-twentieth-century biosphere:

http://waterwars.wikidot.com

Its process of construction combines elements of indexicality and narrative, dada informatics and role-playing games. The authors add content and develop the site structure independently and in dialogue with each other. The evolving narrative structure produces, as its outer horizon, a lexicon of terms that become its conceptual framework—and vice versa. This is an example of site construction as an emerging digital genre.

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February 6, 2010

Entry 09: Frequency of Posts

Yesterday was the first day since beginning this project that I was unable to add daily content. My initial plan had been to add “something” on a daily basis, and to make the necessity of doing that at such a frequency part of determining what “something” is (see Entry 07, “Is This Anything”). I remain interested in the exterior, conceptual dynamics of such a frame—after On Kawara’s “I Got Up” project as a task of daily self-understanding, over the long run. Yet I also recognize, in refusing conceptual dogmatism, that there are other exigencies. … More

January 9, 2010

Link 01: This at Wikipedia

This, the literary magazine I co-edited with Robert Grenier from 1971–74 and continued to edit and publish until 1982, now has a Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Press. This is how the entry currently reads:

This (magazine)

For the Canadian political magazine, see This Magazine.

This is a poetry journal associated with what would later be called Language poetry.

First three issues edited by Robert Grenier and Barrett Watten (1971-1973); subsequent nine issues edited by Watten (1973-1982) who also published monographs under the imprint This Press (1974?-1986?).

External links

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