Browsing by Author "Dobson, James E."

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Open Access
Moonbit
(punctum books, 2019-07-20) Dobson, James E.; Mosteirin, Rena J.
Moonbit is a hybrid work comprised of experimental poetry and a critical theory of the poetics and politics of computer code. It offers an extended intellectual and creative engagement with the affordances of computer software through multiple readings and re-writings of a singular text, the source code of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer or the “AGC.” Moonbit re-marks and remixes the code that made space travel possible. Half of this book is erasure poetry that uses the AGC code as the source text, building on the premise that code can speak beyond its functional purpose. When we think about the 1960s U.S. space program and obscure scientific computer code, we might not first think about the Watts riots, Shakespeare, Winnie the Pooh, T.S. Eliot, or scatological jokes. Yet these cultural references and influences along with many more are scattered throughout the body of the code that powered the compact digital computer that successfully guided astronauts to the Moon and back and in July of 1969. Moonbit unravels and rewrites the many embedded cultural references that were braided together within the language resources of mid-century computer code. Moonbit also provides a gentle, non-expert introduction to the text of the AGC code, to digital poetics, and to critical code studies. Outlining a capacious interpretive practice, Moonbit takes up all manner of imaginative decodings and recodings of this code. It introduces some of the major existing approaches to the study of code and culture while provide multiple readings of the source code along with an explanation and theorization of the way in which the code works, as both a computational and a cultural text.
Open Access
Perceptron
(punctum books, 2025-11-21) Dobson, James E.; Mosteirin, Rena J.
Perceptron is a work of experimental poetry and a critical biographical reading of Frank Rosenblatt (1928–1971) and his 1957 invention, the Perceptron. The Perceptron was the first widely publicized and used machine learning device and the origin of much contemporary neural network technology. Rosenblatt was a psychologist, a computer engineer, a musician, an amateur astronomer, a sailor, and a poet. The Perceptron was born from an interdisciplinary mix of ideas and was so far ahead of its time that it was widely misunderstood by other scientists and the public. This mechanical invention, imagined as an alternative to general purpose digital computers, and its algorithmic implementation as a simulation of the device was deeply rooted in mid-twentieth century neuroscience and psychological theories of behavior. Introduced to the world by one newspaper under the headline “Shades of Frankenstein!” in 1958, following a public demonstration in Maryland sponsored by the US Navy, the Perceptron was a radical new approach to designing computer systems. What made it different was its design as a simplified model of animal vision systems. The Perceptron could perform pattern recognition and matching from a collection of simple visual objects. It was innovative and impressive, but it was also constantly oversold by its financial supporters, the press, and by its inventor. Perceptron traces, contextualizes, and celebrates the ideas that would become embedded in this early thinking machine and that animated the excitement and promise that would eventually turn to frustration and failure during Rosenblatt’s tragically short lifetime.