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"Computer programs Fiction."
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Light years
When a mysterious virus turns into a worldwide pandemic, sixteen-year-old Luisa Ochoa-Jones travels across the country in search of a cure, discovering that the fate of humanity may rest in the confluence of her extraordinary computer programming skills and a synesthesia-like condition that causes her senses to misfire when she is under emotional stress.
Book
The Second Life Herald : the virtual tabloid that witnessed the dawn of the metaverse
How a virtual journalist in the virtual world of online gaming landed on the real-world front page of the New York Times and how his virtual newspaper chronicled the emergence of the next generation of the World Wide Web.
eBook
Fade to Blue : a novel
Eighteen-year-old Goth Sophie Blue, sensing that something is awry in her small town, begins to piece together the connections between her missing father, a scientific researcher at a local laboratory, and her high school's football star, Kenny.
Book
“Resistance is futile”: reading science fiction alongside ubiquitous computing
Design-oriented research is an act of collective imagining—a way in which we work together to bring about a future that lies slightly out of our grasp. In this paper, we examine the collective imagining of ubiquitous computing by bringing it into alignment with a related phenomenon, science fiction, in particular as imagined by a series of television shows that form part of the cultural backdrop for many members of the research community. A comparative reading of these fictional narratives highlights a series of themes that are also implicit in the research literature. We argue both that these themes are important considerations in the shaping of technological design and that an attention to the tropes of popular culture holds methodological value for ubiquitous computing.
Journal Article
The boyfriend app
Seeking to win a scholarship offered by global computing corporation Public, programming genius Audrey McCarthy writes a matchmaking app but discovers her results may be skewed by a program Public is secretly using to influence teens.
Book
Big data meets storytelling: using machine learning to predict popular fanfiction
Fanfictions are a popular literature genre in which writers reuse a universe, for example to transform heteronormative relationships with queer characters or to bring romance into shows focused on horror and adventure. Fanfictions have been the subject of numerous studies in text mining and network analysis, which used Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to compare fanfictions with the original scripts or to make various predictions. In this paper, we use NLP to predict the popularity of a story and examine which features contribute to popularity. This endeavor is important given the rising use of AI assistants and the ongoing interest in generating text with desirable characteristics. We used the main two websites to collect fan stories (Fanfiction.net and Archives Of Our Own) on Supernatural, which has been the subject of numerous scholarly works. We extracted high-level features such as the main character and sentiments from 79,288 of these stories and used the features in a binary classification supported by tree-based methods, ensemble methods (random forest), neural networks, and Support Vector Machines. Our optimized classifiers correctly identified popular stories in four out of five cases. By relating features to classification outcomes using SHAP values, we found that fans prefer longer stories with a wider vocabulary, which can inform the prompts of AI chatbots to continue generating such successful stories. However, we also observed that fans wanted stories unlike the original material (e.g., favoring romance and disliking when characters are hurt), hence AI-powered stories may be less popular if they strictly follow the original material of a show.
Journal Article
2025 CCCC Exemplar Award Acceptance Speech: Looking to the Next Half Century
In a speech, Anne Ruggles Gere, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English Emerita and Gertrude Buck Collegiate Professor of Education Emerita at the University of Michigan, commends various authors who shaped her thinking as a graduate student and early career professor. Ed Corbett's Classical Rhetoric helped students conceptualize their audiences and purposes for writing. Janet Emig's delineation of composing processes made stages of writing comprehensible. Students' Right to Their Own Language cast the idea of \"error\" in a new light and inspired one of her earliest publications. All of these authors were amazingly approachable and did not shrink away from her \"fan girl\" response to them. In the almost five decades since 1978, she had been coming to CCCC pretty much every year because this is where things happen in their field. They've gone from sentence combining to linguistic justice, from debates about including literature in first-year writing, to considering how AI tools like ChatGPT shape their teaching and research. They've drawn on Maxine Hairston's 1985 \"Breaking Our Bonds\" speech as they've considered whether writing should remain with or separate from English.
Journal Article
Experiencing time in prison: the influence of books, libraries and reading
PurposeThe purpose of this article is to explore the influence of books, libraries and reading on the experience of time within the prison environment.Design/methodology/approachUsing semi-structured interviews with Australian adult prisoners, and a phenomenological data analysis method, the researcher has been able to identify lived experiences that explain how books, libraries and reading influence the experience of time, within a prison environment.FindingsPrisoners' experience of time differs from the experience of time outside prison. Unlike readers and library users outside prison, prisoners are motivated to use books, libraries and reading to pass time. They are using books, libraries and reading to assist in their struggle to manage the negative effects of excessive quantities of unstructured time.Research limitations/implicationsResearch regarding the motivation to read and use libraries in the general population does not identify the desire to pass time as a factor. In contrast, the current study identifies readers and library users in prisons are strongly motivated to read and visit libraries as a means of passing time. This study adds a new understanding of the motivation to read and visit libraries within prison environments and provides insight into the beneficial influence of prison libraries on prisoner wellbeing.Originality/valueThis research contributes valuable new knowledge regarding the experience of time in prison, and the influence of books, libraries and reading on this experience.
Journal Article
Brief Report: Does Watching The Good Doctor Affect Knowledge of and Attitudes Toward Autism?
Individuals’ knowledge and attitudes about autism spectrum disorder (ASD) work together to shape the stigma held about ASD. One way that this information is communicated to the public is through popular media; however, little is known about the effectiveness of fictional depictions of ASD in educating and shaping attitudes about ASD. The purpose of this research was to investigate the impact media has on knowledge about and attitudes towards ASD, compared to that of a college lecture on the subject. Exposure to one episode of a fictional drama depicting ASD, compared to watching a lecture, resulted in more accurate knowledge, more positive characteristics associated with ASD, fewer negative characteristics associated with ASD, and a greater desire to learn more about ASD.
Journal Article
Toward a dataist future: tracing Scandinavian posthumanism in Real Humans
Artificial intelligence is likely to undermine the anthropocentrism of humanism, the master narrative that undergirds the modern world. Humanity will need a new story to structure our beliefs and cooperation around. As different regions explore posthumanist alternatives through fiction, they bring with them distinct traditions of thought. The Swedish TV series
Real Humans
(2012–2014) and its British remake,
Humans
(2015–2018), dramatize the challenge of freeing oneself from cultural presumptions. When negotiating personhood with humanoid robots, the Swedish protagonist family presupposes a social-democratic ethos, which is a trace of Scandinavian humanism that carries into the family’s posthumanist beliefs. Using Heideggerian and related perspectives, I analyze these series to make a case for a
dataist
ontology with potential to re-enchant the modern world and bring forth a new epoch of being. Such a master narrative of
algorithmic universality
could be facilitated by a new level of interconnectedness made possible by AI. This ontology fulfills the requirements of Robbins and Horta (Introduction, Cosmopolitanisms. New York University Press, New York, pp 1–17, 2017) who call for a cosmopolitanism of inclusivity with room for overlapping conceptions to remedy our present era’s international dysfunction. The Swedish and British TV series suggest that even if humanity’s uniting around a dataist master narrative were to be driven by intercultural competition, the decisive choice might be out of human hands. Paradoxically, such disempowering in terms of agency is portrayed as necessary for human
re-enchantment
.
Journal Article