User:Ålnik

Hello, world! Ål here.

About

Digitart, illustration, visual facilitation & scribing, graphic design. Looking for experimenting with tools, researching peculiar topics and finding focus before the end of XPUB2. ;)

XPUB1

Special Issue #16: Vernacular language processing

coming soon; listen to some music while you wait

Meanwhile, here are my current experiments on how can we process vernacular languages:

Vernacular language processing methods

00. Mix of Sauces

Reader prototyping project developed in class by Kamo, Supisara & me. We tried the method of taking a complex text and simplifying by putting it in chat bubbles. Find out more here.

01. Blackout (poetry)

def Blackout poetry (when a page of text is completely blacked out (coloured over with permanent marker so that it is no longer visible) except for a select few words. When only these words are visible, a brand new story is created from the existing text.)

Blackout (poetry) is an intervention in someone else's work to create new meanings, express new ideas, find new directions. It can also be a way to annotate and focus on the big picture. Or not?

Example: Blackout poem from the first page of the "House of dust" journal, see here. There are at least two ways to read the annotated result - 1 here and 2 here.

02. Repetition and new meanings

By printing a short sentence a hundred times, repeating itself, we can discover a new meaning. We can start from a different word every time and construct several meanings. Pretty simple, but fun to try. Example: Welcome to the World of Bees

03. Petition comments processing

Experimenting with my first steps in processing natural language with Python. For this exercise I took a petition tackling the housing crisis in the Netherlands and the comments of people who signed it. In order to get to know their stories, real problems and reasons for participation, I copied their comments in a pad and then ran a function to extract the adjectives - the words they used to describe the situation or their feelings. See the petition comments pad here and the pad with the extracted adjectives. Here is the processing code.

Challenges not solved: we see the adjectives out of context; you don't see when an adjective had also a negative "no/not" before it. How do you get what was the sense behind the adjective when filtering them like this? What can you do with this output?

04. Vernacular maps

Work in progress...

Research

What is vernacular language? Before, now, tomorrow. When was the first time anyone came with the concept of vernacular? How can it be processed? What interventions can be done and why?

In the world of abstract, whilst trying to orientate myself, I am looking for familiar things and starting points. A little side-gig exploration on my own is available here and here.

Reading list

Orientation in a Big World: On the Necessity of Horizonless Perspectives (Patricia Reed)
Queer Phenomenology - Orientations Objects Others (Sara Ahmed)
Whistleblowing from Below: Finnish Rural Inhabitants’ Letters to the Imperial Power at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Sami Suodenjoki)

Prototyping

Embracing on a journey to play with programming and create stuff whilst doing that.