In August 2018, Zach Whalen, associate professor of English and director of the minor in digital studies, traveled to Montreal to participate in the annual conference of the Electronic Literature Organization. At the conference, Whalen presented research on using computational text-analysis to study and interpret the work of a community of practitioners who use code to generate novels every November in an event called National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo).
Whalen also performed a reading of his own NaNoGenMo 2017 book titled The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex, an 800-page long “children’s book”
