Lossy text compression, for some reason?! By Allison Parrish Although it had been hovering at the edge of my consciousness for decades, I only recently came to really understand how JPEG compression works. I'm a poet, so once I had this insight---OMG EVERYTHING IS A WAVEFORM---I had to find some way to apply this procedure to text. Compressing text with a lossy algorithm seems, on the surface, to be completely pointless. BUT IS IT?! In this talk I will discuss my experiments with lossy text compression and show how the outputs range from completely useless to strangely poetic to maybe, actually, dare I say it... practical?