ahmmnd | Adam Hammond

Since I got interested in running marathons a few years ago, I’ve wanted to run Boston. I think it’s mainly because of their ingenious marketing campaign, the concept of “BQ” (Boston Qualifying) times, which serve as shorthand in all age/sex categories as the standard of being a “good runner.” Whe..

An Algorithmic Approach to Creating “The Perfect Science Fiction Story”

In December 2017, Wired magazine published a story by Stephen Marche called “Twinkle, Twinkle.” Julian Brooke and I were involved in the creation of the story, which was written with the help of our “algorithm” (actually, of course, a whole bunch of algorithms, some of them ours, some of them not…

A Total Beginner’s Guide to Twine 2.1

Building on the (surprising) popularity of my Total Beginner’s Guide to Twine 2.0, I’ve just posted a fully updated series of videos for Twine 2.1. The differences between the two versions are subtle, but sufficient to warrant a new series of videos. And I think these guides are a little better or..

Running

Number Two: Los Angeles Marathon 2017

Having gotten really in to running last summer, I ran my first marathon in October, in Victoria, BC. It was an overwhelmingly positive experience: the race itself was great and I really surprised myself by running it in under three hours. But as soon as I crossed the finish line, I started thinkin..

A Total Beginner’s Guide to HTML and CSS

Ever since creating my moderately popular guide to Twine last year, I’ve been meaning to put together a series of videos explaining the basics of HTML and CSS, the coding languages of the web. Since Twine publishes to these standard web formats, knowing a bit about how they work can be very useful..

A Total Beginner’s Guide to (Literary) Twitter Bots

For the first time in my life, I’m teaching a programming class for English students. There have been a few bumps in the road, but all in all, it’s been pretty awesome. My students make me proud every class, not only figuring out stuff they thought they had no business figuring out, but doing incr..

A Poetic High-Five Through the Ages: Bob Dylan’s “As I Went Out One Morning” and Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening”

Count me among those pleased Dylan won the Nobel Prize today. Only snobbery can explain so many writers’ outrage at his win. If you think that Dylan isn’t a “real poet” because he likes to sing his poetry out loud and set it to music, you’re denying the history of poetry as an oral form often set ..

2016: A Summer in Running (Updated)

Update: Read to the bottom for my experience in my first marathon.

Last summer, I got obsessed with watching sports. This summer, I got obsessed with “doing” sports. Specifically, running.

I’ve never run much. In my 20s, I was in to cycling to an insane degree. I was going on super long rand..

DH 2016 slides: “Project Dialogism: Toward a Computational History of Vocal Diversity in English-Language Fiction”

Earlier today, I gave a short ten-minute introduction to the big new project that Julian Brooke are beginning to work on. Quite a bit of it gives the backstory to our approach, so the exciting new stuff doesn’t really come until the end.

DH Kraków has been amazing; thanks to the organizers and ..

Modernism: Keywords Reviewed in Modernism/modernity

Two years after its first publication, Modernism: Keywords has received its first serious review. To date, the peculiar genre of the book (is it a reference work? a monograph? an edited collection?) has made it a challenge for potential reviewers. We have received some quite disappointing reviews ..