Michael Falk

This book offers a new critique of selfhood in Romantic literature. In the past, Romanticism has been seen as an individualistic movement, with writers believing in the ‘centrality’ of the self. Challenging this prevailing view of Romanticism and the modern self, this study unveils an alternative tradition of Romantic writing in which the self is fragile, degenerate, non-existent – or in a word, contingent. It combines philosophy, intellectual history, literary studies and digital humanities and takes a transnational approach both in its coverage of philosophical thought and literature, including case studies from England, Ireland, Scotland and colonial Australia, with examples from American and European works as well. The book also uses innovative digital techniques such as text analysis, sentiment mining and network analysis to enrich the exploration of text and context. It covers all major genres of Romantic writing: fiction (realist novels), poetry (the sonnet), non-fiction prose (biography) and drama (gothic tragedy). Providing a new framework for understanding the contingent self, this book is of interest to scholars and students of Romantic literature, philosophy of the self and digital humanities.

Public debate about AI is dominated by Frankenstein Syndrome, the fear that AI will become superhuman and escape human control. Though superintelligence is theoretically possible, it distracts from a more pressing problem: the rise of Artificial Stupidity (AS). This article discusses the cultural roots of Frankenstein Syndrome, and provides a conceptual framework for evaluating the stupidity of artificial agents. It then identifies an alternative literary tradition that exposes the perils and benefits of AS. In the writings of Edmund Spenser, Jonathan Swift and E.T.A. Hoffmann, ASs replace, enslave or delude their human users. More optimistically, Joseph Furphy and Laurence Sterne imagine ASs that can augment human intelligence by serving as maps or as pipes. These writers provide a strong counternarrative to the myths that currently drive the AI debate. They identify ways even stupid agents can thwart human aims, and demonstrate the social and scientific value of literary texts.

This year, the wikihistories team set out to understand how well Wikipedia represents Australian places and what kinds of editing practices drive those representations. Examining 35,000 articles about Australian places and interviewing volunteer editors, we found that English Wikipedia reflects an anthropocentric and neo-colonial image of Australia as a place.

In 2020, the Wikimedia foundation launched its first new project in nearly a decade. The new project consists of two main parts: (1) Wikifunctions, a library of programming functions; and (2) Abstract Wikipedia, a language-agnostic Wikipedia that will be dynamically translated into the reader’s native tongue. Lying beneath both Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia is a new system called Wikilambda, which can execute code in potentially any programming language, providing a massively flexible computing service drawing on Wikifunctions and powering Abstract Wikipedia. The entire system is designed to address a fundamental bias in Wikipedia, namely its bias towards majority languages such as English and Spanish. In this paper, I present Wikilambda as an audacious attempt to realise a ‘perfect language’, as theorised by Umberto Eco (The Search for the Perfect Language. Making of Europe. Oxford, UK Eco U (1995) The search for the perfect language. Oxford, Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell) Wikilambda provides a way of specifying functions that is supposed to transcend any particular ‘native’ language. In this way, it provides editors of Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia with a way of contributing to the overall system no matter which ‘native’ programming languages they know. More broadly, Wikilambda aims to achieve the ‘democratization of programming’, by enabling any person to use any function without needing to know English or a particular programming language (Vrandečić 2021). To analyse the technical and ideological aspects of Wikilambda, I apply the techniques of Critical Code Studies (Marino in Critical Code Studies, The MIT Press, Marino MC 2020) Critical code studies. The MIT Press, Cambridge. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12122.001.0001) to ‘the orchestrator’, the JavaScript application that instantiates Wikilambda’s new functional programming language. In the absence of a formal specification of the language, the Abstract Wikipedia team has gradually hacked Wikilambda out of JavaScript, leaving a fascinating public record of their attempt to realise their vision for a universal programming system.