I was able to rewrite the program from my first homework assignment to work with sets, which proved to be a much more efficient approach.  Unfortunately, that efficiency allowed me to more quickly be dissatisfied with the results.  I was able to filter many different text through each other, but the syntactical commonalities tend to be cliche or often used phrases, in the example of filtering the bible through gatsby common phrases included

set(['on the other side of', 'of men and women and', 'on the third day that', 'from the other side of', 'the other end of the', 'He stretched out his hand', 'the ends of the earth', 'of the house, as though', 'on the edge of the', 'from the top of the', 'and put it on the', 'at the head of the', 'and the voice of the', 'the other side of the', 'for the rest of the'])

When filtered through the bible looking for a 6 word common phrases, Gatsby becomes:

At this moment a voice, unmistakably Wolfshiem’s called “Stella!” from the other side of the door.
The first supper–there would be another one after midnight–was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were three married couples and Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo and obviously under the impression that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside–East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety.

Which isn’t very interesting.  Running the old testament through The Wasteland returned one commonality,‘on the other side of’, which, of course, we have seen before.  I think the fundamental flaw here is the idea that this process would be recognizable.  If anything, I learned that the English language really is pretty cool because its very rare that even a 6 word phrase is used in two different sources.

Continue reading →

I think one of the problems with the various poetic examples of electronic text is that it lacks the sort of cultural coding that readers expect from genre.  There is a certain resistance to reading and interpreting text so obviously divorced from it’s original meaning and also when it is often impossible to construct a traditional meaning or narrative from what we are reading.  But the disconnect between meaning and aesthetic isn’t so fundamental as the lack of genre.  Whether you are reading poetry, fiction, non-fiction or any other text based genre, you know what you are reading because the genre is announced to you, either aesthetically, or in the title, on the cover of the book.  If you see a poem with fourteen lines you know you’re reading a sonnet.  In order for electronically or algorithmically written text to be read correctly, it must find a way to announce it’s genre as such.  While the process of a piece of electronic text might be what makes the piece interesting, this is not true if the process is made opaque to the reader.  And explaining the process in technical terms isn’t really a great solution either.  The reason that remixes involving music and image/video work so well is because the elements are easily identifiable.  A mix is essentially taking something from a famous song and adding new elements to it.  People like it because they recognize the famous song and enjoy hearing it a new way or maybe they don’t.  To do this with text there must be ways of identifying the source—a couple of possibilities from the top of my head: using a famous source, like “To be or not to be” or using repetition, which is in a way how the grep stuff we’ve looked at works.

Continue reading →