Here’s a list of links to student projects made for Reading and Writing Electronic Text, along with a brief description. I thought all of my students did great work this year, and it was a pleasure to teach them!

Centrality by Aankit Patel. I guess I could describe this as “lexicographical dataglitch-punk.” There is an online version available.

Bing Huang‘s TextFinal is an audiovisual meditation on the Declaration of Independence.

Caitlin Weaver produced Susan Scratched, a poem glitched through with a distinctive kind of repetition. A lovely performance of the poem is available on SoundCloud.

Clara Santamaria Vargas made Gertrude’STime, which takes the phrase “in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling” from Tender Buttons literally, and generates poems accordingly.

Dan Melancon‘s L SYSTEM POEM SYSTEM POEM L POEM L SYSTEM does what it says in the title: applies a Lindenmayer System to an input text. The output exhibits a strangely hypnotic form of uncanny alien repetition.

Eamon O’Connor’s final project uses the CMU pronouncing dictionary to produce metrical verse. Several examples are included on the page.

Hellyn Teng‘s final project was Kepler-186, a multimedia poem about exoplanets and home economics. Documentation includes sound snippets and screenshots.

Jason Sigal‘s write-up of his final project, The Phrases and Pronunciation is fantastic—he goes into detail about his process and the technical and conceptual decisions that he made along the way.

@mfilippino Marriage is a mouth oil of going on together that requires cork; edge means that there is a holding on to quest.

— Rambling Taxidermist (@TaxidermyRamble) May 22, 2014

John Ferrell made a Twitter bot called the Rambling Taxidermist, whose inspiration and inner workings he has written up here. The bot responds to tweets about marriage with ill-advised, mashed-up advice composed partially from a taxidermy handbook.

Michelle Chandra created a lovely poem about loneliness, drawing upon a corpus of well-known quotes. I love the repetition and alliteration in this one, well worth reading.

Ran Mo‘s Birdy News juxtaposes Twitter jokes with NY Times to often humorous effect.

Robert Dionne‘s final project, Reading Between the Lines, generates multidimensional poems from distributed word vectors.

Industries must never go everywhere.

— everything always (@_all_of_us_) May 27, 2014

Salem Al-Mansoori‘s final project, @_all_of_us, is a machine for creating random platitudes and aphorisms. It takes the form of a Twitter bot and a generative comic strip.

Sam Lavigne‘s program to Transform any text into a patent application has attracted a lot of press attention, so you might have already seen it! Original and well-executed. I love this project.

Sheri Manson created a series of three poems, based on words and phrases drawn randomly from an interesting selection of source texts.

Uttam Grandhi‘s project The Baptized Pixel uses image data to generate poems with binary-like repetition.

Recent silence of NSA doing good works.

— One True Wise Man (@onetruewiseman) May 25, 2014

Vicci Ho made a Twitter bot, @onetruewiseman, that combines the social media wisdom of several conservative luminaries.

UNMANNED POETRY DRONES
Friday May 9th, 2014
7pm
721 Broadway, New York, NY
Tisch Common Room (ground floor)
FREE!

Please join us as a semester of experimentation with procedural text culminates in a one-night-only performance of computer-generated poetry. Seventeen students at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program will take the stage and, with their voices, set aloft poems and prose produced by programs of their own design. You are likely to encounter: poems made from pixels, automated propaganda, lexicographical cut-ups, twitter bots, and more.

Reading and Writing Electronic Text is a course offered at NYU’s Interactive
Telecommunications Program. (http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/). The course is an introduction to both the Python programming language and contemporary techniques in electronic literature. See the syllabus and examples of student work here: http://rwet.decontextualize.com/

Poster design by Caitlin Weaver (http://www.phasesofsputnik.com/). Print-quality poster art can be downloaded here.

Here are a few things I made recently that didn’t make it to my blog.

• Most Convenient Form is a satirical text generator based on a reactionary New Yorker article that stuck in my craw. It blames the downfall of rational discourse on a random meme from Know Your Meme.
• Snaquia is a little game I made with PuzzleScript. It’s sort of a demake of Art Style: Aquia, a DSiWare game that I have lost many, many hours to.
• I get all indignant about people who get all indignant about “words of the year.” I generated several thousand fake headlines to troll such people.
• Unicode Ebooks is a Twitter bot that I made in response to the Horse Ebooks hoax. Every twenty minutes it posts 140 random Unicode codepoints. Inexplicably, it has (as of this writing) 44 followers.
• Full width is a Mac OS X keyboard layout file that maps the letters on your QWERTY keyboard to their fullwidth equivalents, so ｙｏｕ　ｃａｎ　ｔｙｐｅ　ｌｉｋｅ　ｔｈｉｓ.

Here’s yet another Twitter bot: Pizza Clones. Every two hours it generates a joke in the form of “Every {NOUN} is a(n) {ADJECTIVE} {NOUN} when/if/as long as {SUBORDINATE-CLAUSE}.” Some sample output:

Every theater is a live theater if you're going to be talking the whole time https://t.co/H7XSnpLi0o https://t.co/1ym79dXpNu

— Pizza Clones (@pizzaclones) November 8, 2013

Every night is a late night if it was 1936 https://t.co/ruVrExwJGk https://t.co/40K2YYiSvE

— Pizza Clones (@pizzaclones) November 7, 2013

Every representation is an accurate representation if it smashed them full on in the face https://t.co/5OdHipKYfr https://t.co/tpRNAdZlvY

— Pizza Clones (@pizzaclones) November 5, 2013

Every tweet is an inspirational tweet unless you have a Google+ account https://t.co/jGS95NuLvw https://t.co/sxN3qBiRJw

— Pizza Clones (@pizzaclones) November 9, 2013

It’s an attempt to imitate and elaborate on the joke “Every pizza is a personal pizza if you try hard enough and believe in yourself.” That joke in particular is hard to attribute to one person (appearing on Twitter here as early as 2010, more recently here and here), but the general syntactic pattern is found in well-known bits by Mitch Hedberg (“every book is a children’s book if the kid can read”) and Demetri Martin (“every fight is a food fight when you’re a cannibal“).

The bot works by first searching Twitter for tweets containing a phrase in the format “this isn’t a(n) {ADJECTIVE} {NOUN}” and then using a Pattern search to identify and extract the ADJECTIVE and NOUN. It then searches Twitter for phrases that match the string “{NOUN} if” (and “{NOUN} unless”, “{NOUN} as long as”, etc.), and extracts the rest of the clause following the “if.” (There’s some more NLP behind the scenes to ensure that the “if” clause will fit the joke syntax.) Then it jams the NOUN, ADJECTIVE and subordinate clause into the format of the joke and tweets it out to the world. It does this every two hours. Links to the tweets from which the substance of the joke was extracted are included in the body of the tweet, for attribution purposes. The bot keeps a small database of previously used clauses to prevent it from repeating itself too frequently.

I’ll admit that this is a pretty obscure joke, but I’m really happy with the output. The noun—occurring both in the adjective/noun pair and adjacent to the “if” clause—gives the jokes a semantic anchor, but the fact that the text is grabbed from two different tweets (and two different contexts) keeps the jokes surprising and weird. I’m also pleased at how almost all of the tweets feel grammatical, given the limited degree of NLP involved in the procedure. Follow Pizza Clones on Twitter!

I made a Twitter bot called Voynich Tech News. Every few hours it posts a link to a technology news blog along with a random snippet of text from a transcription of the Voynich manuscript, interspersed with randomly extracted noun phrases from the title of the blog post. The intention is to make it seem like the Voynich text is reporting/commenting on/elaborating on the blog post it links to.

I made this weird bot for a number of reasons.

First off, I discovered this transcript of the Voynich manuscript recently and found it fascinating. (Here’s a link to the full, uncompressed text.) The manuscript itself is beautiful, of course, but because the symbols are unfamiliar, it’s hard to get a sense of what the text “feels” like, from a structural and statistical perspective. Looking at the transcript, you instantly understand that the symbols aren’t just random gibberish—there’s a discernable, language-like structure. I wanted to bring the transcript to other people’s attention, and I wanted to do something creative with it so I could understand it better.

Second, and this is a bit of a stretch, I wanted to help decipher the script. The Voynich manuscript is famously undeciphered, and it’s debatable whether it even represents language at all. It could be steganography, or an elaborate cipher, or graphic glossolalia. (Wikipedia has a good overview of the various theories.) Deciphering a script is easier when you find a sample of that script in a new context. Although there’s no “new” text being posted to @VoynichTechNews—it’s all drawn verbatim from the transcript, except for the interjected bits of tech news—my hope is that seeing the text do something new, juxtaposed with something unexpected, might jostle something loose in someone’s brain and bring about an epiphany about how the script is structured, and what it might mean.

Oh, and I wanted to have some fun at the expense of people who obsess over technology news on Twitter.

Technical notes: I used TextBlob to extract “noun phrases” from blog post titles. The parsing is imperfect so sometimes it looks like it’s just “random substrings” rather than “noun phrases,” but that serves the aesthetic just as well. My procedure for extracting text from the Voynich transcript was to take the first complete transcription of each line, strip whitespace (marked as ‘-’ and ‘=’ etc. in the transcript), and put it into a big text file. To compose the tweet, I choose a random stretch of words from that file. The words in the tweet therefore might consist of stretches of text that might not be contiguous in the actual manuscript (if, for example, two lines next to each other in my text file are actually found on different pages in the MS).

I made another twitter bot! This one’s called Zzt ebooks. Several times a day, it posts a tiny snippet of text drawn from a corpus of all games from the archive of ZZT games on zzt.org.

ZZT, in case you don’t know, is a game creation system for DOS dating back to the 1990s. I basically spent all my teen years making ZZT games and hanging out (online) with people—mostly teenagers—who made ZZT games. During its heyday, hundreds of new ZZT games were released every year, and a culture and language of conventions developed surrounding how ZZT games were made and distributed. It was weird and charming and angst-ridden and amazing all at once. Anna Anthropy is writing a book about ZZT that I am very excited to read.

ZZT includes a simple programming language for scripting in-game objects. Programs you write in this language are stored in the game file itself as plaintext. One feature of this scripting language is that if, in the course of running a program, the interpreter finds any text that isn’t a programming language construct, that text will appear on the screen, usually in a modal dialog that allows you to read at your own pace. This text is used for exposition, dialog, room descriptions, etc. The corpus for the bot comes from extracting all such non-program text from a (relatively) recent scrape of all the ZZT games from zzt.org.

To generate the text that the bot tweets, I randomly selected a line of text from the corpus, then appended each succeeding line in the corpus, up until I reached 140 characters. (There’s a random chance that the algorithm will stop after each line, to give the tweets some variation in length.) No Markov chains involved, which is rare for me! The tweets you’ll read amount to tiny text-dumps of ZZT games, clipped to resemble the style of Horse ebooks.

My program for extracting program text from ZZT games is imperfect, and it sometimes leaves in non-program garbage text, so I combed through the initial tweet list and removed any that had special characters or weird formatting. I also removed anything that seemed grossly sexist, homophobic, or otherwise violent. (The ZZT scene was always predominately populated by adolescent boys, so there’s a surprising amount of this.) And I removed anything that seemed to reference real, individual people—some ZZT games were made about the ZZT scene itself, and those games sometimes got a little mean (to my eye, at least). I don’t want to be in the business of digging up and re-airing anything hurtful.

I have mixed feelings about whitelisting tweets in this manner, but in the end I decided that I’d rather make something whimsical and nostalgic, rather than (what would have amounted to) an often-offensive satire of teenage behavior. I ended up with several thousand tweets, which should be enough to keep the bot going for a year or two.

If you’re an author of a ZZT game and you see text from your game included in Zzt ebooks that you feel has been misappropriated, let me know and I’ll remove it immediately. Otherwise, enjoy!

GENERATE THIS

Thursday, May 9th, 2013
7pm
721 Broadway, New York, NY
Ground floor (Common room)
Free

On this evening, fifteen students of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program will read aloud their experiments in generative and procedural electronic text. These experiments, built using the Python programming language, have been brewing and bubbling for the duration of the semester. Examples of what you may encounter: the Bible meeting the Kama Sutra, while the New York Times site meets its own comments. Markov chains of many sizes and varieties; otherworldly haiku; accidental hiphop; attempts to pronounce the unpronounceable. The corpus meets the body. One night only!

Reading and Writing Electronic Text is a course offered at NYU’s Interactive
Telecommunication Program. (http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/). The course is an introduction to both the Python programming language and contemporary techniques in electronic literature. See the syllabus and examples of student work here: http://rwet.decontextualize.com/

Poster design by Hiye Shin.

This is just a quick notice that I’ve moved around/updated a few archival items on the site.

• Filthy Ditty now lives on decontextualize.com. It was previously hosted on Posterous, which is shutting down on April 30th 2013. Filthy Ditty is an archive of a “poem-a-day” effort I completed in April 2011.
• The syllabus and notes for Expressive Computing are now a static HTML site (at the same URL as before). Previously these files had been hosted on a poorly secured MediaWiki installation. Expressive Computing was a course I taught at Hunter College in 2008 (the first university-level course I ever taught!).

I made a new Twitter bot. It’s called @PowerVocabTweet. Here’s a screenshot:

Every few hours, the bot posts a randomly generated word along a randomly generated definition for that word. It’s a procedural exploration in a genre I like to call “speculative lexicography”—basically, @everyword‘s dada cousin.

On the surface, Power Vocab Tweet is a parody of “word-of-the-day” blogs and Twitter accounts. My real inspiration, though, comes from the novel Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin. In that book, a group of underground linguists invent a language (Láadan) that “encodes” in its lexicon concepts that aren’t otherwise assigned to words in human languages. Elgin’s contention is that the manner in which a language “chunks” the universe of human perception into words reflects and reinforces structures of power; therefore, to break the world up into words differently is a means of counteracting the status quo. (In a much less rigorous way, I attempted to explore similar issues in my design of Pey Shkoy—except in the systems of grammatical roles and thematic relations, instead of in the lexicon.)

Elgin’s protagonists (and Elgin herself, in the design of the Láadan language) did this with laser focus; Power Vocab Tweet does it in a more scattershot way. It claims random (and potentially nonsensical) patches of semantic space (which may already be partially claimed), assigns words to them, and hopes that something sticks. Try using one or two Power Vocab Tweet words in a sentence. It’s fun!

The definitions are generated via Markov chain from the definition database in WordNet. The words themselves are generated from a simple “portmanteau” algorithm; each word is a combination of two “real” English words of the appropriate part of speech. (The forms of the words and text used to generate the associated definition aren’t related.) A previous version of this code was featured on Filthy Ditty.

Update: PVT on MetaFilter, New York Review of Bots.

Only nine months too late to truly capture the zeitgeist, I made an automated parody of #whatshouldwecallme-style tumblrs. It’s called GIF and Circumstance. (Warning: potentially NSFW.)

A “#whatshouldwecallme-style tumblr” is one in which animated GIFs are paired with a title expressing a circumstance or mood—usually a clause beginning with “when.” I wrote a Python script to make these kinds of posts automatically. Here’s what it does:

(1) Search Twitter for tweets containing the word “when.”
(2) Extract the “when” clause from such tweets.
(3) Use Pattern to identify “when” clauses with suitable syntax (i.e., clauses in which a subject directly follows “when”; plus some other heuristic fudging)
(4) Post the “when” clause as the title of a tumblr post, along with an animated GIF randomly chosen from the imgur gallery.

The results range from nonsensical to eerily appropriate. Not bad for a weekend hack.

UPDATE: GIF and Circumstance on Metafilter!