Williambot

A social experiment in radical empiricism

ITP Camp 2015

Rachel Boyce (@roastbeest)

William JamEs

Can creative text manipulation teach 19th-century philosophy?

Twitterbot

• interactivity
• non sequitur
• new audiences

mechanics

1. James corpus parsing
   • Meaning of Truth from GITenberg
   • python TextBlob
   • tweet-sized bites
2. tweet generation
   • python tweepy
   • search phrase "meaning of truth" every hour
   • construct unique tweet
   • include response id for "conversation" viewing

results

• 10 days of tweeting
• ~3 tweets per day
• variety of LOLs

Sea world

TV

inter-bot

next directions

• continue monitoring interactions

• meta-analysis for subject content

• can another bot instigate real people saying the phrase?

• how do we determine if an account is a bot or not? 

@_william_james_

thanks!