ABSTRACT
Around 2003 a participant identified as “Kenneth Burke” began making the rounds in chatrooms and other online environments, announcing itself with a morbid invocation of one of Burke’s central concepts: “Hello I am Kenneth Burke; even though I have been dead for a few years, I would like to enter this conversation.” This eerie salutation from the digital beyond is not an instance of online haunting, but the “Kenneth Burke chatbot”—a program with enough language-recognition coding and stored Burke quotations to converse in a combination of case-specific response and Burkeisms.
