Author: Pip Thornton

Guest lecture in Amsterdam this friday

I’m talking ‘Linguistic Capitalism: Critique and Intervention’ as part of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie graphic design department’s Opening Lecture series this Friday in Amsterdam. It’s open to the public – 18:30pm at Butchers Tears, Karperweg 45, Amsterdam. The amazing invite GIF is by design students Benedikte Hindstedgaard & Pernille Knudsgaar. Also speaking is Danah Abdullah from Brunel University – I am very much looking forward … Continue reading Guest lecture in Amsterdam this friday

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new (and old) work at the Fringe

This is my first Edinburgh Festival, and I find myself right in the bubbling middle of it. I’m doing three things: 1. as part of the Fringe Design Informatics ‘Data Play’ program, my {poem}.py printer will be churning away in the most amazingly designed Pavilion space from 2nd – 26th August, along with a specially curated collection of poem-receipts. Robbie Burns, Jackie Kay, Frightened Rabbit, … Continue reading new (and old) work at the Fringe

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Language in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction: A Thesis

I passed my PhD viva a couple of weeks ago, so can now post the finalised version here if anyone wants to read any of it (but please cite accordingly): THORNTON_THESIS_FINALFINAL. Language in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction: A Critique of Linguistic Capitalism will also be available from my Royal Holloway PURE page, but I want to keep monitoring the price of the thesis over … Continue reading Language in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction: A Thesis

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Unknown Soldiers: Building Bodies in(to) the City

While searching for other stuff I came across this paper – the first academic paper I ever wrote and presented – which I gave at the Uncanny Landscapes conference in London in March 2013. It seems like the right time of year, so I thought I’d let it out in to the light… Unknown Soldiers: Building Bodies in(to) the City Abstract On 11th November 1920, … Continue reading Unknown Soldiers: Building Bodies in(to) the City

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New GeoHumanities article – A Critique of Linguistic Capitalism: provocation/intervention

My article A Critique of Linguistic Capitalism: provocation/intervention has now been published online first in GeoHumanities : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2373566X.2018.1486724 There were 50 free eprints available at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/9Nm9BBmHdwdFYRxjqejh/full, but for anyone without institutional access, the accepted manuscript is attached below (as per Taylor and Francis guidelines). I can share the published PDF privately on request. A_Critique_of_Linguistic_Capitalism_GEOHUMS_final_PT_edit_JC2_PT_73 A critique of linguistic capitalism: provocation/intervention Abstract Language has always been … Continue reading New GeoHumanities article – A Critique of Linguistic Capitalism: provocation/intervention

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Language Redux

I have a new short piece about the value of language in the digital economy out in APRJA Research Values, ed. by Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox. I use {poem}.py (my artistic intervention into Linguistic Capitalism & Google AdWords), to re-work Christian and Geoff’s introduction 3 ways:  http://www.aprja.net/language-redux/ This issue is the result of the Research Values workshop at the Brandenburg Center for Media … Continue reading Language Redux

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geographies of (con)text: language and structure in a digital age

Geographies of (con)text: language and structure in a digital age is an article I published last year (2017) in Computational Culture: a journal of software studies. It began life as an AAG paper called The Production of Context and Digital Reproduction of Language, presented in one of the Geographies of Software sessions organised by Nick Lally and Ryan Burns in 2016. The article talks about … Continue reading geographies of (con)text: language and structure in a digital age

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The Meaning of Light: Seeing and Being on the Battlefield

I haven’t always written about algorithms and digital capitalism, but I have previously used poetry as a lens through which to expose the politics and asymmetries of technology and space. The Meaning of Light: Seeing and Being on the Battlefield (cultural geographies Vol: 22 issue: 4) is a paper I published in 2015 based on my experiences as a reservist soldier in Iraq in 2003. … Continue reading The Meaning of Light: Seeing and Being on the Battlefield

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What is Orwell’s 1984 really worth?

£58318.14 to be precise. In theory anyway… to Google. I’ve been playing around with running longer texts through {poem}.py and eventually managed to process (and price) the whole of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I use the idea of Newspeak in my critique of Google’s monetisation of language, so I thought it made sense to use the book for this particular experiment. The book took 7 … Continue reading What is Orwell’s 1984 really worth?

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