@IKnowTheseWords: A Twitterbot Textual Performance

xtine burrough

doi:10.21153/ps2016vol2no1art529

Authors

xtine burrough University of Texas at Dallas, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2016vol2no1art529

Keywords:

Twitterbot, being and becoming, wordhord, automation

Abstract

Twitterbots automate the process of tweeting. They proliferate the social network with messages crafted for hash tags, themes, or replies. @IKnowTheseWords is a bot that I created to assist me in automatically archiving my wordhord from the “OED Word of the Day” database as an online Twitter performance. As such, the bot is a helper-agent that serves words to my Twitter timeline, one day at a time. Consequently, it is essential that I talk back to the bot, letting it know (and anyone else who views these tweets and replies) which words should be included in my personal archive. This process will take years as the bot and I perform the tasks: Tweeting a word from the OED, sorting each word, and capturing those words that are part of my current vocabulary using a Twitter archiving Google spreadsheet. With two “I”s involved in the process of knowing—or not—these words, @IKnowTheseWords speaks predictably and intelligently as a bot and randomly, with culturally specific musings as the “I” who replies to each tweet. In this case study I arrive at a philosophical understanding of how the project made a theoretical pivot as a result of its current processing and performance with emerging media tools.

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Author Biography

xtine burrough, University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Associate Professor, School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication, University of Texas at Dallas.

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