The other week I came across some work being done by Botnik and Botnik Studios to create strange new things with machine learning. The creation that caught my eye was a chapter for an entirely new Harry Potter book made using a predictive text algorithm like you might find attached to a cell phone keyboard. By training the algorithm on the text of Harry Potter they were able to produce new dialogue and narration that seemed like the original Harry Potter, but is completely new and bizarre.

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Recently, I came across a blog post by Tony Hirst on computational essays and how they can be used to facilitate learning. Hirst was reflecting on an earlier blog post by Stephen Wolfram on what defines a computational essay. Computational essays are, as paraphrased from Hirst and Wolfram, a mixture of plain language, computer input, and computer output allowing the user to interweave narrative with code and the output from that code.

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