Mishmashed Writing as Performance

Some ideas are born to be expressed -- while other infantile thoughts should be considered but never uttered or placed into action.

We are confused by the meaning and intention of this "digital writing" course where computers are given the odd requirement of inventing new stories:

This course introduces the Python programming language as a tool for writing digital text. This course is specifically geared to serve as a general-purpose introduction to programming in Python, but will be of special interest to students interested in poetics, language, creative writing and text analysis. Weekly programming exercises work toward a midterm project and culminate in a final project. Python topics covered include: functions; object-oriented programming; functional programming (list comprehensions, recursion); getting data from the web; displaying data on the web; parsing data formats (e.g., markup languages); visualization and interactivity with Python. Poetics topics covered include: character encodings (and other technical issues); cut-up and re-mixed texts; the algorithmic nature of poetic form (proposing poetic forms, generating text that conforms to poetic forms); transcoding/transcription (from/to text); generative algorithms: n-gram analysis, context-free grammars; performing digital writing. Prerequisites: Introduction to Computational Media or equivalent programming experience.

Where is the creative compassion in a digital publishing project that trains -- requires, really -- writers to give up their inspiration in favor of sterile bits and bytes and the randomness of a programming language?

We understand this could be an oddity of an experiment for the purpose of silliness and entertainment and not real scholarship -- but if the true end result is to ultimately replace the author in the precious dyad between book and reader -- then we firmly come down on the side of the parchment Luddite locked in a room with pencil and paper sweating out syntax and a seamless semiotic to impress human ideas upon the future unborn.