The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at UVic is pleased to invite you to “Digital Writing, AI, and Visualization,” an end of semester celebration featuring talks by Dr. Bernardo Bueno (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul) on digital writing and artificial intelligence and Dr. Brian Wyvill (UVic) on visualization software for writers. Please consider joining us for what is sure to be a stimulating set of talks and discussion!
When: Tuesday May 16, 3pm-4pm
Where: McPherson Library room 210
RSVP: Please RSVP by Friday May 12 to alyssaa@uvic.ca to register for this event. Registration is free but required.
Talk titles and abstracts
“Navigating Digital Writing and AI: An Optimistic and Slightly Apocalyptic Examination”
Dr. Bernardo Bueno
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought about significant changes in the field of literature. Not long ago, the idea of an AI system writing acceptable poems, essays, and stories was considered distant. However, with the advent of ChatGPT and similar tools, we have seen a radical shift in this scenario. As writers, we can now engage with AI creatively and responsibly, but this development has also raised urgent ethical questions that demand investigation. This talk will explore the ethical implications of using AI in literature, including issues of copyright and the potential disappearance of human writers. We will also consider whether we will see AI-generated fiction being sold alongside human fiction, and whether hybrid (human + AI) fiction is a possibility. These questions are essential to understanding how creativity works and to determine if there should be limits to what digital technology can do in the literary chain of production and consumption. (This abstract was revised by ChatGPT and it did a great job).
“SceneWizard: A Visualizer for a Novel”
Dr. Brian Wyvill
SceneWizard is designed to help authors keep track of the multitude of things that they have to know about their story. This includes timelines, characters, chapters, scenes, story threads, artifacts, and ideas. The system is based on two principles. The first is that no author wants to spend a lot of time visualizing instead of writing. The second is that the author’s view of a story is very different from the reader’s view. Earlier software in this field had only one view, that of the reader. SceneWizard provides the author with multiple views of the scenes and characters in the book in chronological order. Since this order is not necessarily what the reader sees, SceneWizard also provides the reader’s view of the book. The author view contains more information than does the reader view, as the author has to know considerably more about the scenes and characters than is presented to the reader. The talk will be illustrated by a live demo of the software.
Bios
Dr. Bernardo Bueno is a lecturer in literature and creative writing at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Brazil, where he also serves as the Adjunct Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Letters. Currently Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing and the Coordinator of the newly established PUCRS Digital Humanities Lab. He holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. As an author, Bernardo has written the illustrated children’s book Naná & Maria, the novel Dias Lendários, and the short story collection Minimundo.
Dr. Brian Wyvill has had some interesting life experiences, ranging from creating animated sequences for the movie Alien to climbing expeditions in Patagonia. As a computer scientist he invented new techniques for 3D modelling and animation and has published more than 150 academic papers. He spent 15 years living in Canada’s Rocky Mountains where he climbed, skied, wrote plays, and acted with the Rocky Mountain Shakespeare Company. He moved to Victoria on the West Coast in 2006 to take up a Canada Research Chair at the University of Victoria, and to be nearer the Pacific. He retired from teaching in 2019 and has been developing visualization software for authors. His first historical novel was published by Thunderchild Publishing in 2018. In The Second Gate he turns from covering the page with mathematical symbols to writing a sea faring adventure set during the Napoleonic wars. New books coming soon: The Spy Of Malta and Napoleon’s Weather Report.