Usher Alexis James
ENGH 377
ELC3 Review
6/3/21

The work that I chose to look at from the Electronic Literature Collection is the
Pentametron which is a bot that filters through tweets that are written in iambic pentameter to
create poems and funny couplets. The bot pairs the lines/topics together based on rhythm and
rhyme, and they can be read through a twitter feed. Readers can scroll through twitter either on
the computer or their phones to read or view the lines of tweets from others that have been
matched together. Since this work utilizes a bot to do what it does, I don�t think that this work
could have been produced outside of a digital medium. Also, because this bot utilizes words and
topics that people have already written in the form of tweets, if the twitter or tweet aspect were
removed then the product would not be the same. Although one could copy and paste the tweets
to a document and print them, that would take away the interactive and continuative quality of
the work.

The key tools in this work are the bot and Twitter, a social media application, which
creates the environment for reader engagement. Since all of those tweets are from different
people on Twitter, it is like those people have all come together to create a long poem that has
been going on for quite few years now as the bot continues to formulate couplets from tweets.
Also, as Twitter lets the author of the tweet know that their tweet was retweeted, they can
immediately go check out how their tweet was used in the work. Plus, this provides a way for the
reader of the work to not only participate as a reader but also as a writer if their tweet was
retweeted for use by the bot. Therefore, this interesting engagement dynamic is created through
this work to create something that is interactive on a global scale since people from all around
the world use Twitter and could have their tweet(s) retweeted by the bot.