Getting Poetic with Donald Trump

     Twitter bots have the power to make or break your timeline; sometimes bots take text and post the most hilarious nonsensical phrases that coincidentally make sense when put together, and other times, it's just nonsensical phrases. On the look for the former type of bot, I found @DeepDrumpf-- a Twitter bot that takes phrases and words from Donald Trump's actual Tweets, rearranges them, and makes new Tweets that are-- dare I say-- moving.

     Just like all bots, not every single one of his "Drumpfed" Tweets will change your life or necessarily emotionally touch you; however, when looked at within the context of what's going on in the world and the United States, this Twitter bot creates a highly entertaining and satirical look at Donald Trump and his opinions.

     For example, he says "[Forget Pence, Ken Bone is the] very best of America. He and I will bring the nation peace. He's very innocent company, folks;" if you watched the most recent debate on Sunday night, Ken Bone became a social media icon almost immediately for what he was wearing. Within the same debate, Donald Trump also admitted to disagreeing with some of his vice presidential candidate's policies. Because of the context that this Tweet is placed in, it is made all the more humorous.

     Another example that is less obvious and more ironic on Trump's part is, "[Women love] me. I'll make them great again, like in Iran. We have to have that suppression, it's good for my business." Although Trump may have not said any of this verbatim, he has alluded to most of the content in this Tweet, if not all of it. With his recent statements regarding women and sexual assault as well as his notorious foreign policies, this Tweet sticks out like a sore thumb because Donald Trump

has this blinder pulled over his eyes, and is somehow at the front of a race for the reins of a country.

Twitter and Guns

   



One component of the digital humanities realm is self-generated text that's composed through a sort of equation, or software. This is the same for Twitter bots; some common Twitter bots are @pentamatron as well as @deepdrumpf and @NRA_tally. At times, the text generated by these bots is nonsense, however, the NRA Tally tweets factual shootings that happen around the United States. Although its number in followers is small, the words and statistics that NRA Tally tweets are heavy, speaking out full with meaning. This constant stream of statistics that sheds such a negative light on the NRA, one of the Republican party's biggest proponents, stands out as a political protest, giving a bot a voice.

Who Owns What

      The past couple of weeks in Digital Humanities has made me rethink the past three or four years of my upper-level writing career. Although short, I can securely say that I have had ideas of intellectual property and ownership jammed into my brain-- for lack of a better phrase. Since high school it has always been "give credit where credit is due" and "you may rephrase something, but you must notify your reader where the idea came from." Reading pieces where artists take the work and words of others without paying credit and making it their own gives me a strange feeling of insecurity as well as freedom, and I have to wonder if this is what change within the humanities feels like in real time. Artist Alison Clifford manipulates the work of poet e.e.cummings into works that depict landscapes that grow as the reader interacts with them in her piece "The Sweet Old Etcetera". Although created and thought of by Clifford, the words are written by cummings. Similarly, the work "Camel Tail" was created by artist Sonny Rae Tempest; however, the software its text is generated from was created by Nick Montfort, and the text was written by Metallica.