#everyword

Allison Parrish is a poet and programmer who researches and makes art about language, often in the context of computation and the Internet. She is the author most recently of Articulations, a book of generative poems from an algorithm which extracts linguistic features from over two million lines of public domain poetry, then traces fluid paths between the lines based on their similarities.She co-created Rewordable, a fantastic word-building card game and favorite Scrabble-alternative for my family. She is also the creator of the legendary everyword Twitterbot, where thousands followed the progression of English words from 2007 to 2014. Her github is here.

You may notice this interview has a different flow than the others, as it’s a transcribed conversation rather than the usual e-mail-based interview.

» Can you tell me a little about your background; how you learned to code, how you started experimenting with code and language?

Oh sure. When I was 5, we got a Tandy computer, a color TRS-80 computer 2 for Christmas and it came with a programming manual. It had just like the regular Microsoft BASIC that came on every 8-bit computer at the time, so that's how I learned how to program. Just being 5 years old and sitting down in front of the TRS-80 and typing in the examples from the manual that came with it and doing fun stuff that way and that turned into what people expected me to do.

» So your first computer use was all command line stuff

Yeah, it was the Color Computer 2, and then DOS programming and then I took some UNIX classes as an undergrad, so it's all been command line, textmode stuff, that's always been the main interest of mine.

» So did that grow naturally into working with language?

It's interesting, I hadn't made the connection, but there was another game creation system -- we were talking about MegaZeux earlier -- but what came before that was ZZT. Do you know about ZZT?

» No, I don't know about any of these things [laughs]