The Analytical Onomasticon Project An Auto-Ethnographic Vignette
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Abstract
As Russ Wooldridge pointed out many years ago, all too often “the computer disappears into the background” once its results are to hand (http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/chwp/). This is especially true if those results fall short of expectations. In the following I describe the history of a project whose failure in those terms turned out to be far more important than its impossible success would have been. The moral of this story is that with persistence the futile struggle to conform works of the imagination to finite, algorithmic requirements is, or can be, transformational. To quote Italo Calvino, the encoder plays a game that if played long, hard, and well enough “finds itself invested with an unexpected meaning [. . .] slipped in from another level” (1980/1966, §4).
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