Cleaning for Poems
From Algolit
by Algolit
For this exhibition we're working with 3% of the Mundaneum's archive. These documents have first been scanned or photographed. To make the documents searchable they are transformed into text using Optical Character Recognition software (OCR). OCR are algorithmic models that are trained on other texts. They learned to identify characters, words, sentences and paragraphs. The software most often makes 'mistakes'. It might recognize a wrong character, it might get confused by a stain an unusual font or the other side of the page shining through. These mistakes can also seen as poetic interpretations by the algorithm. They tell us something of how it has been constructed, what it has been learning from, what standards are and how you can explore the limits of a machine. In this installation you can choose how you treat the algorithm's misreadings, pick your degree of poetic cleanness, print your poem and take it home.
Concept, code, interface: Gijs de Heij