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Back for the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe! NEWSPEAK & {poem}.py at the Scottish Storytelling Centre – what are #wordsworth ?

The original iteration of Newspeak visualised the words of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as if they were commodities on a stock exchange. Using live data scraped from Google Ads, the text of the book scrolls across the screen as ticker-tape. The fluctuating prices of the words are determined by what they are worth to Google in the context of an advert. The project is a political … Continue reading Back for the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe! NEWSPEAK & {poem}.py at the Scottish Storytelling Centre – what are #wordsworth ?

NEWSPEAK 2019

NEWSPEAK 2019 is the latest iteration of my ongoing intervention into linguistic capitalism and the economic, cultural and political effects of the monetisation of language by Google’s search and advertising platforms. The installation was a collaboration with Ray Interactive as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Data Lates program. FULL DETAILS OF NEWSPEAK 2019 HERE Full details for the project can be found in the … Continue reading NEWSPEAK 2019

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

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

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?