Kirsten Menger-Anderson

About Me

author photo: kirsten menger-anderson; photo by Dave Thau I am a technical writer, essayist, researcher, and novelist based in San Francisco, California. My first book, Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain (Algonquin, 2008), was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in fiction and one of Time Out Chicago's Top 10 books of 2008. My essays have appeared in LitHub, Undark, Towards Data Science, Becoming Human: Artificial Intelligence Magazine, and Q.E.D. I earned an MA in English and creative writing from SFSU and a BA in economics from Haverford College. I once worked as a production manager for Wired Digital and as the Director of Production for Salon.com.

More details about my new novel THE EXPERT OF SUBTLE REVISIONS coming soon!

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Essays

A selection of recent essays.

WHEN AN AI WRITES WIKIPEDIA

How much does GPT-Neo know about us?

UNSETTLING SOMETHING

Why do we mistake computer generated poems as the work of humans?

MY SEARCH FOR LOVE POEMS FINDS GENDER BIAS

An opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle

ILLUSTRATIONS OF LOVE

I asked my computer to match 1000 love poems to 1000 images from the Met.
The Love Carousel Project

IN THE MOOD FOR A BEAUTY & FITNESS LOVE POEM?

Interested in science? Shopping? Music? I made a love poem carousel for each.
The Love Carousel Project

SEARCHING FOR LOVE POEMS

Are all the great poets dead?

ON GENDER, TECHNOLOGY, AND OPEN COLLABORATION

A study of Wikipedia citations

Daphne Kalotay on Female Friendships in Literature and Life

THE SUM OF WHAT?

On Gender, Visibility, and Wikipedia

INTO THE GAP

What Machine Learning Reveals About Gender And Writing

CAN YOU MEASURE THE HAPPINESS OF YOUR FAVORITE STORY?

On happiness, humans, machines and literature

A CONSTANTLY EVOLVING CONVERSATION

Using technology to monitor and protect the environment

The Ethics of Digitally Networked Beings

Why I Protest

Our history, our literature, and our responsibility

What Does It See?

The troubled gaze of an artificial intelligence

Who’s Important?

A tale from Wikipedia

How I Turned My Discarded Novel Drafts into an AI

Could a computer learn to imitate me?

Silently Censored

A story in photographs

FICTION

"Menger-Anderson's fictional take on the harsh realities of old-world medical science is at once grotesque and utterly compelling, as are her madcap characters, who desire so earnestly to find a cure--whatever the cost." -- SEED Magazine

"Vivid and Original" --Publishers Weekly

"An unforgettable literary experience" --Mary Roach, author of Bonk, Stiff and Spooked

"Menger-Anderson has written an intelligent and humorous history of the science of brains--and the brains of science." -- New England Journal of Medicine

"This is a remarkable debut by a writer to watch." --Ben Fountain, author of the B&N Discover Award winning Brief Encounters with Che Guevara