Modernist Crossings - Inspect Source: Constraint and the Poetics of Code

This talk traces creative computation as a composite field combining procedural art, computer-generated poetry, and code itself and situates them as objects of humanistic inquiry. Drawing on rhetoric and critical code studies, paired through a methodology of critique as creation and creation as critique, we will examine how algorithmic constraint becomes generative practice, with wide-ranging examples (with one or two inspired by modernist literature). 

Rather than treating code as neutral infrastructure, reading code and output together reveals how programming choices like randomization carry rhetorical and political weight. The talk argues that 'authorship' in works of creative computation is distributed across programmer, system, and source corpus. We will reflect on the pedagogical applications of creative computation, and we will close with a hands-on making activity inviting participants into the creative and critical process firsthand.

Carly Schnitzler is a Senior Lecturer in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. Her teaching and research center digital rhetoric, creative computation, and the public humanities.

Her ongoing book project, Generations: Rhetoric, Community, and Resistance in Creative Computation, examines how computer-generated art and poetry, and the communities that form around them, amplify and complicate social critiques of contemporary digital life. She also co-edited TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies with Annette Vee and Tim Laquintano (WAC Clearinghouse, 2023), an open-access collection of early experiments in teaching writing with generative technologies, and serves as lead editor of its ongoing companion, TextGenEd: Continuing Experiments. Together, the two collections have reached over 329,000 unique visitors. 

Her other work appears in journals and edited collections including Pedagogy, Digital Humanities Quarterly, electronic book review, The CEA Critic, Textshop Experiments, and Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures, among other venues. She regularly publishes in HCI computer science venues with her collaborators. A recent paper won the Best Paper Award at CHI 2025, and a follow-up study received an Honorable Mention at C&C 2026. She founded and continues to co-organize If, Then: Technology and Poetics with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, a working group and event series supporting inclusivity and skills-building in creative computation for artists, scholars, and teachers.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the JHU Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, the JHU Center for Social Concern, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the JHU Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation, among others. Before coming to Hopkins, Schnitzler taught writing and literature courses at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she received her Ph.D. Her courses are organized around digital and public humanities projects, and she encourages collaboration, play, and thoughtful revision in and outside the classroom.