In Stratford-upon-Avon, Scanning Machines Produce the Strangest Poetry...

Apparently, libraries in and around Shakespeare's hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon are the newest homes for the "RFID-based book scanning machine that turns returned titles into verse." Generally speaking: "Librarians ... use the machines to record books that are dropped off, and last month, a Stratford staffer noticed that some of those receipts were downright lyrical." The libraries have been tweeting the joyous results. Electric Lit reports:

Since then, several other Warwickshire libraries have joined in—all in the spirit of fun, says Stephanie Bellew, a reader development librarian at Warwickshire Libraries: “There is no rivalry/competition between our libraries — we’re just sharing the words and hopefully others will join in or simply gain pleasure/inspiration from our offerings.” However, perhaps due to its literary heritage, the Stratford branch is still the most prolific (and, as below, occasionally disturbing).

Machines are notoriously bad at generating or even interpreting literature—see, for instance, our reporting about an artificial intelligence trying unsuccessfully to write the first line of a novel, or this article on the difficulty of machine translation. Usually, when they write something decent—like those predictive text novels and scripts that blow up Twitter occasionally—it’s because there’s been a massive amount of human editing on the back end.

 

Is there human involvement in this case? Well, humans write the book titles, which is probably primarily responsible for the success of the RFID poems; they’re using a limited number of input strings, all of which are already meaningful phrases. Humans also select which books to check out, which can lend a theme to a poem. But librarians swear the scanners do the rest themselves...

Read on at Electric Lit.