Computer-Generated Gibberish Accepted as Paper for Academic Conference

by Liberty and Power

Some students act like jerks and throw pies (weren't they doing that tired prank way back in the 1980s?). Others pull more creative, and socially productive, stunts. Witness this gem of a story :

In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference.
Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with" context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.

Will this ever happen at the OAH? Perhaps it already has.

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Anthony Gregory - 4/17/2005

This somewhat surprises me, for a scientific paper. But it reminds me of this great site online that will generate, randomly, postmodern essays, most of the time yielding a paper with just the right jargon for many humanities classes these days. The last essay I generated would have definitely garnered an A in some classes, with its contention that "If one examines textual dematerialism, one is faced with a choice: either accept cultural libertarianism or conclude that culture is used to oppress minorities, given that consciousness is distinct from truth. The subject is interpolated into a postmaterialist capitalist theory that includes culture as a whole."

And, of course,

If one examines Foucaultist power relations, one is faced with a choice: either reject posttextual sublimation or conclude that the significance of the participant is deconstruction. Thus, the subject is interpolated into a Foucaultist power relations that includes reality as a reality. Hanfkopf[2] states that the works of Gibson are empowering.

"Class is part of the rubicon of truth," says Lyotard; however, according to von Junz[3] , it is not so much class that is part of the rubicon of truth, but rather the dialectic of class.

Check it out and have fun. The postmodern possibilities are endless.