ED 677 SP 14

It’s 10 p.m. and the assignment is due at midnight. Fear begins to nibble at you. At this point, your bibliographical information is nothing more than a dizzying assortment of tabs stuffed across the top of your Web browser and some books surrounded by bags of junk food and empty soda cans. The next two hours will be spent furiously, exhaustedly, and fruitlessly formatting source citations, plugging URLs into sites like EasyBib and Citation Machine, desperately hoping that the professor won’t notice that the dates are wrong and the names aren’t spelled right. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Advertisement Students’ hatred of the citation process is not because of any concerted effort to plagiarize, but rather a result of frustration with a slew of outdated conventions for proper citation methods.

A Russian book written by a computer in St. Petersburg is to hit the country’s bookstores at the end of January. The book, published by the city’s Astrel SPb publishing company, is the work of a computer program, created by a team of IT specialists and language experts. The 320-page novel, called “True Love,” is a variation on Leo Tolstoy’s 1877 classic “Anna Karenina” but written in the style of Japanese author Haruki Murakami. It is based on 17 famous literary works that were uploaded onto the program. Within 72 hours, the computer generated its novel about true love. Alexander Prokopovich, 39, chief editor of Astrel-SPb, said the idea of using the software shocked his editorial team at first, but then they got carried away with the idea. The experiment seemed interesting, Prokopovich said. Prokopovich said the style of the book is based on the Russian translation of Japanese writer Murakami. The main characters are Tolstoy’s but “they get into a completely different situation,” he said.