For the Materialities of Writing seminar two years ago, I created a questionable/silly “Old Timey Doctor” bot (@HistoricalWebMD). It spewed out poorly phrased medical advice from a fairly limited word bank for longer than it should have been allowed to run until eventually something broke, and I shut down operations. This week’s excursion is my first time back in Twitterbot land, and since I apparently have enough Twitter accounts for my phone number to not allow me to make a new app, I’m currently reusing my old bot for new testing purposes.

In my last Twitterbot foray, most of the code was provided for me; I just needed to enter the word bank. This time — even with over ten hours of Python tutorial under my belt (confession: in the over ten hours, I maybe made it halfway through) — playing with the code was much more of a challenge. It confounds me how much metadata runs behind what appears to be a simple 140-character (or less) Tweet.

My original/eventual vision for my Computational Media bot is called J. J. Audubot, and it’ll use text from John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography. I realized, however, that the pdf digitization of the volumes makes it difficult to cut and paste into a text-only document — so I’m still in the early stages of figuring that out, and from there, deciding what J. J. Audubot will actually say, and why it might matter to the wider world of Twitter. (Maybe J. J. Audubot should be a Chatterbot instead).