To Hide a Leaf: Reading-machine for a Book of Sand electronicbookreview.com /essay/to-hide-a-leaf-reading-machine-for-a-book-of-sand Karen Ann Donnachie , Andy Simionato by Karen Ann Donnachie Andy Simionato 05-03-2020 thread: electropoetics https://doi.org/10.7273/chg4-cx05 This essay was peer-reviewed. electropoetics Included in the Gathering: ELO2019 Gathering (Cork, Ireland) Working with a custom-coded, automated-art-system of their own devising, Australian digital artists Karen Ann Donnachie and Andy Simionato have now archived a literary corpus for future study in what they have called The Library of Nonhuman Books. Yet it remains uncertain whether human scholars will visit Donnachie's and Simoniato's virtual library. Seeing as how "there are no human ‘typewriters’ now, how can we be sure there will still be human ‘readers’ in the future?" In this essay, we will describe how and why the reading-machine was ideated, what the reading-machine does, as well as definitions of the terms we have adopted within the research. We will begin by outlining how the reading-machine uses computer vision and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in order to identify the text on any open book placed under its dual-cameras, we will then describe how the system leverages Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to uncover brief ‘poetic’ combinations of words on the page, which it preserves, while erasing all other words. Finally, we will describe how the reading-machine automatically searches for an illustration from the Google Image Archive to ‘illuminate’ the page according to the meanings of the remaining words. Once every page in the book has been read, interpreted, and illuminated, the system automatically publishes the results using an Internet printing service, and the resulting volume is then added to The Library of Nonhuman Books. In this essay, we are primarily focusing on the design and functions of the reading-machine, and we will address the books it creates, and the implications of the literary and aesthetic outcomes these embody, more closely on another occasion. 1. Significance of the title 1/9