Christopher Jimenez: The Letter A, as in AI

What happens to the letter when writing becomes computational and, from there, when computation becomes generative? Beginning with the apparently simple question of what the letter “A” is, this talk follows the historical concept of the letter through the strange metaphysics of digital writing, suspended as it is among code points, character encodings, glyphs, fonts, bitstreams, tokens, and now AI systems. Along the way, the letter becomes less a stable object than an explosive assemblage of numerical identities, graphical forms, technical standards, and material instantiations. We will take this material instability of the letter as a point of departure for asking larger questions about AI: How do letters condition intelligent expression, and how might new approaches to literal representation expand the possibilities of such expression?

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Christopher Demers Jimenez, Ph.D., is the AI & Machine Learning Developer on the Research Data & Digital Scholarship team at the Penn Libraries, where he develops tools and services for scholarly experimentation with artificial intelligence. His academic training spans literary studies, the digital humanities, and computer science, and his current research explores the computational dimensions of alphabets and character encoding systems as well as the relationship of these to machine intelligence. He received his Ph.D. in English from Penn in 2017 and was an inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Doctoral Fellow at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities.