Comp Comp
The Pupil
The first time I studied R as an undergraduate, I decided swiftly that it was the work of the devil. Then I studied C and, in that light, R was a beautiful beam of kaleidoscope rainbow goodness.
Today, I did my usual balancing act. I awoke, made myself a cup of tea, fed my cats, and sat down to review French definite articles and Portuguese family members. I drafted an essay on Natural Language Processing and its medical applications to submit to a potential employer. I took some notes for my novel. I looked over datasets in that beautiful beam of kaleidoscope rainbow goodness, R.
This is what I do. Every day, I exist in a liminal space between comparative literature and computer science. As I call it, comp comp.
And comp comp comes together in what I love most: Computational creativity. I write stories; I want machines to write stories. I love poems; I want machines to love poems. To live as a story is to have a soul, and can a soul inhabit – breathe in, breathe out, breathe in again – a collection of wires and switches? There is a part of me, something very romantic and very like a poem itself, that emphatically says yes. What is a soul if not an exuberance of stories knitted together into a fine thread? A waltz of every element that lies within us?
This is why I love comp comp. Because, for something as discrete as computer science and wily as comparative literature, there is a common ground, and that is the notion that something underpins thought, cognition, as we know it, but whatever that something is, it remains elusive. Every theorist has his or her own answer to this question, and the process of trying to answer the question is more compelling than the answer itself.
The pupil attended statistics lectures and did her best, but her best was not good enough. She did not take to Java naturally, and tripped and fell between one bug and another in her code. But I can say with a certain peace that she did not die there.
The Autodidact
I study languages, natural and programming. As I teach myself R and Common Lisp, I also devour books of Portuguese and Tamil like they are my morning tea.
The autodidact is fierce, can do anything, and nothing brings her to trembling. The autodidact whispers to herself at night, while she dreams, while she burrows into her inner world, while she plans her outfits, while she puts on a hat, while she arranges her colored pencils and favorite pens. And she says, “I am unstoppable. I am become master of polynomial regression.” The autodidact has taught herself how to spot prime numbers from afar, how to track the changes of American literature after 9/11.
Comp comp overwhelms her the way the river overwhelms the boulder. She does not worry about leaving her twenties behind without making a mark in computational creativity.
Tonight, the autodidact goes back to her datasets and studying the concept of vectors in the beautiful beam of kaleidoscope rainbow goodness. She listens to classical music as she writes these words, and nothing is amiss. She has comp comp on her side.
