The longer term value of creativity judgements in computational creativity

During research to develop the Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems (SPECS) methodology for evaluat- ing the creativity of ‘creative’ systems, in 2011 an evaluation case study was carried out. The case study investigated how we can make a ‘snapshot’ decision, in a short space of time, on the creativity of systems in various domains. The systems to be evaluated were presented at the International Computational Creativity Conference in 2011. Evaluation was performed by people whose domain expertise ranges from expert to novice, depending on the system. The SPECS methodology was used for evaluation, and was compared to two other creativity evaluation methods (Ritchie’s criteria and Colton’s Creative Tripod) and to results from surveying people’s opinion on the creativity of the systems under investigation. Here, we revisit those results, considering them in the context of what these systems have contributed to computational creativity development. Five years on, we now have data on how influential these systems were within computational creativity, and to what extent the work in these systems has influenced further developments in computational creativity research. This paper investigates whether the evaluations of creativity of these systems have been helpful in predicting which systems will be more influential in computational creativity (as measured by paper citations and further development within later computational systems). While a direct correlation between evaluative results and longer term impact is not discovered (and perhaps too simplistic an aim, given the factors at play in determining research impact), some interesting alignments are noted between the 2011 results and the impact of papers five years on

Imaginative Recall with Story Intention Graphs

Intelligent storytelling systems either formalize specific narrative structures proposed by narratologists (such as Propp and Bremond), or are founded on formal representations from artificial intelligence (such as plan structures from classical planning). This disparity in underlying knowledge representations leads to a lack of common evaluation metrics across story generation systems, particularly around the creativity aspect of generators. This paper takes Skald, a reconstruction of the Minstrel creative story generation system, and maps the representation to a formal narrative representation of Story Intention Graphs (SIG) proposed by Elson et al. This mapping facilitates the opportunity to expand the creative space of stories generated through imaginative recall in Minstrel while maintaining narrative complexity. We show that there is promise in using the SIG as an intermediate representation that is useful for evaluation of story generation systems

Feeling forgotten : the survival of Romantic memory in Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, and Walter Scott, 1784-1815

textFeeling forgotten charts a shift in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English literature that is structured on a crisis of memory. This shift consists in a movement towards a literary construction of aesthetic and moral self-forgetfulness that draws its intense power from an anxiety about human mortality and historical forgetting. Through analyses of texts that depict the need to overcome individual and cultural loss through a desire for oblivion, Feeling forgotten contends that the Romantic period gave birth to anti-mnemonic aesthetic in which the displacement of a perceived loss of the feeling of lived memories into various literary fictions preserves the past in such a way as to answer an unavoidable loss of feeling by asserting that the past, one's own and others, can be felt (again) in the complex affective experience found in reading about the past. In a more ambitious sense, Feeling forgotten attempts to point the way towards an understanding of Romantic and post-Romantic nostalgia as a strong rejection of its melancholic forbearers and as a response to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century self-forgetting. Indeed, the rejection of this more complex Romantic form of nostalgia, one in which the always frustrated attempt to inscribe forgetfulness itself into the text of memory is productive of the ongoing act of writing, would become the founding principle for later forms of nostalgia that seek to render forgetting as an act that resides outside the written text. Based on a reorientation of Charlotte Smith's poetic archive of feelings, which defines feeling as the failure of poetry to contain and defuse feelings themselves, and the passionate rationalism of William Godwin's early nineteenth century texts, in which self-analysis serves as both the generator and corruptor of the sympathetic feelings found in sentimental literature, Walter Scott's passive, amnesiac romances stage the fantasy of an evasion from the political and material significance of history.Comparative Literatur

Folkloric behavior : a theory for the study of the dynamics of traditional culture

Revised edition of dissertation. Revisions from the original print edition held by the library are noted in the preface. Pagination also differs from original print edition."Folklore" may be defined as a class of learned, traditional responses forming a distinct type of behavior. The individual must undergo the psychological process of learning in order to acquire the responses of folkloric behavior, and this learning process occurs under conditions determined by social and cultural factors. The fundamental factors involved in learning are: drive, cue, response, and reward. Secondary factors such as repetition, recency, and ego involvement can contribute, but their presence is not required in the process of learning. Folkloric behavior is distinguishable from non traditional, non folkloric behavior, and consequently, folkloric responses are distinguishable from other classes of responses, such as those characteristic of modern science and technology. Thus, folklorists should initially concern themselves with folkloric responses (narrating, believing, singing, applying a proverb, or dancing) and relevant social and cultural factors before proceeding to the study of the folklore items themselves (narratives, beliefs, songs, proverbs, or dances). Through the application of psychological theories of individual and social learning to folkloric phenomena, we can gain an understanding of the forces affecting the perpetuation or extinction of folklore and thus can explain the function of a particular folkloric response in a particular community

Toward "Total Political History"

How is the segmented and disoriented world of contemporary historical scholarship, in particular, that of American political history, to be reintegrated and revived? Instead of imposing a substantive synthesis, which would narrow the discipline's focus by excluding many interesting topics, I propose that historians adopt a common approach--rational choice theory--that has proven useful in economics and political science. Using notions drawn from rational choice and examples primarily from the American Civil War and Reconstruction period, I examine the assumptions behind and arguments for three theories in intellectual/cultural history--republicanism, "political culture," and positive/negative liberalism. I then try to spell out some of the implications of rational choice models for the study of electoral, legislative, judicial, and administrative behavior

The roots of prejudice against the Negro in the United States

This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

“Fifty Years of Our Whole Voice”: An Examination of the History and Culture Leading to the Publication of Fire!! Devoted to Younger Artists and Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers

According to African American literary theorist Henry Louis Gates, “the slave wrote not primarily to demonstrate humane letters, but to demonstrate his or her own membership in the human community” (128). Two efforts at this demonstration of community membership exist in the publication of the literary journal, Fire!!, written and published by African American artists and writers in 1926 and in the anthology AIIIEEEEE!, compiled and edited by Asian American writers and published in 1974. These compilations, published not quite fifty years apart, are direct responses and reactions to the efforts of the larger society to influence and/or to silence the voices of African American and Asian American people in the United States. The Harlem Renaissance artists seem to have spoken to the AIIIEEEEE! editors, who appear to have continued the conversation in their work while demonstrating the importance of historic memory, cultural influence, and national identity. As Fire!! and AIIIEEEEE! talk to each other, they symbolize the double voice that accompanies the dual consciousness of people of color in America and signify a collective effort to redefine the expectations that white America has of people of color. For each of them, the years and events leading to their publications shape the content, the immediate reception, and the longstanding impact of the publications themselves. Together, the works represent the power of multiethnic presence in American literature, and now, years later, texts continue to speak across generations and cultures and in voices strident enough to empower artists and writers and to influence the direction of American literature. Studying literature and art, not in isolation but in relation to other works, even those from other cultures, enhances the significance of collective contribution and appreciation of the literature that expresses national identity and the American place in the global community. To that end, understanding the significance of the cultural and historical contexts that lead to artistic and literary production provides a comprehensive appreciation of Fire!! and AIIIEEEEE! and their creators by revealing connections, tensions, and diversions for analysis, as well as a more complete understanding of the works themselves

Home Front as Warfront: African American World War I Drama

This dissertation recovers little-known African American World War I plays that blur the boundary between the home front and warfront. I argue that with this focus, the plays wage their own war for African American citizenship rights, using language and performance to gain access to the "imagined" community of the nation. Yet plays from different time periods focus on diverse aspects of the Great War; these differences provide insight into how World War I was thought of and employed, and for what purposes, in African American communities during the interwar years. The project fills an important gap in African American drama, theatre, and war literature scholarship; no book-length analysis exists, yet scholarly conversations surrounding African Americans in the Great War are energetic. Despite scholars' arguments that the war "gave birth" to the New Negro, the plays that dramatize the subject have drifted into obscurity. Thus, this project is overdue; the plays complete the historical picture of African American drama and provide a better understanding of the ways contemporary life in the United States is still haunted by World War I

American Vaudeville as Ritual

This study affords an entirely new view of the nature of modern popular entertainment. American vaudeville is here regarded as the carefully elaborated ritual serving the different and paradoxical myth of the new urban folk. It demonstrates that the compulsive myth-making faculty in man is not limited to primitive ethnic groups or to serious art, that vaudeville cannot be dismissed as meaningless and irrelevant simply because it fits neither the criteria of formal criticism or the familiar patterns of anthropological study. Using the methods for criticism developed by Susanne K. Langer and others, the author evaluates American vaudeville as a symbolic manifestation of basic values shared by the American people during the period 1885-1930. By examining vaudeville as folk ritual, the book reveals the unconscious symbolism basic to vaudeville-in its humor, magic, animal acts, music, and playlets, and also in the performers and the managers—which gave form to the dominant American myth of success. This striking view of the new mass man as a folk and of his mythology rooted in the very empirical science devoted to dispelling myth has implications for the serious study of all forms of mass entertainment in America. The book is illustrated with a number of striking photographs. Albert F. McLean is associate professor of English at Transylvania University.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_theatre_history/1002/thumbnail.jp