Allison Parrish

Welcome to my website! I'm a poet and programmer and an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU ITP/IMA.

What I do

I do research on and make art about language and how it's used and arranged, especially in the context of computation and the Internet. If you want to learn more, take a look at any of the following:

My portfolio, which is a curated collection of the projects I like to show off;
a list of smaller and/or unfinished projects or my old (pre-2017) list of projects;
the list of projects on GitHub that I'm responsible for.

My CV is available on request.

Learn from me

I teach classes on programming, text analysis, computational creativity and culture at the post-secondary level. A few classes I've recently designed and/or taught:

Material of Language (NYU ITP)
Computational Approaches to Narrative (NYU ITP)
Reading and Writing Electronic Text (NYU ITP)
Electronic Rituals, Oracles and Fortune Telling (NYU ITP)
Introduction to Python for Text and Data (Peking University)

Here's a list of older classes, often with links to syllabi, schedules and example code.

I frequently teach tutorials or lead workshops and post the outlines and sample code as GitHub gists. Here's a list of tutorials I made in 2016 and 2017.

Get (or keep) in touch

If you want to get in touch, just send me an e-mail. If you want to have my thoughts and opinions in your social media feeds, try the following:

@aparrish@friend.camp on Mastodon (old account: @aparrish@mastodon.social)
@aparrish on Twitter
aparrish on Pinboard
My e-mail newsletter (note: I haven't actually used this for anything yet!)

This domain previously hosted a Wordpress blog that I was not good at keeping up-to-date. You can access the content of the old blog here.

Watch me talk

Sometimes I give talks and people record them and post them online. Here are a few recent favorites:

Language Models and Poetics, Artificial Intelligence Distinguished Lecture at Vector Institute
Computational Stichography! (Or: Connecting Lines) at !!Con 2020.
Guided Decoding of Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Expressive Non-standard Spelling at UC Santa Cruz Computational Poetry Workshop 2019
Word Breakers: Rewordable and The Raw Material of Word Games at Practice 2018
Experimental Writing with the Vectorized Word at Strange Loop 2017
Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic at Open Hardware Summit 2016. Transcript available here.
Lossy Text Compression, for Some Reason?! at !!Con 2016
Exploring (Semantic) Space with (Literal) Robots at Eyeo 2015. Transcript available here.

Buy stuff I made

A handful of things I've made are available for purchase. They're good things. Avail yourself of this opportunity to possess them.

Rewordable, "The Uniquely Fragmented Word Game"
Articulations, my book of computer-generated poetry
@everyword: the book, "an accelerated, 'director’s cut' experience of the English language like no other"

Press and interviews

Some interviews with me and writing on my work:

Bio

Allison is a computer programmer, poet, educator and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet. She is an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she earned her master's degree in 2008.

Named "Best Maker of Poetry Bots" by the Village Voice in 2016, Allison's computer-generated poetry has recently been published in BOMB Magazine and Nioques. She is the author of @Everyword: The Book (Instar, 2015), which collects the output of her popular long-term automated writing project that tweeted every word in the English language. The word game Rewordable, designed by Allison in collaboration with Adam Simon and Tim Szetela, was published by Penguin Random House in August 2017 after a successful round of Kickstarter funding. Her first full-length book of computer-generated poetry, Articulations, was published by Counterpath in 2018.

Allison is originally from West Bountiful, Utah and currently lives in Brooklyn.