Ainsley O’Connell

Procedural poem “r/Waves” is an invitation to experience Reddit as epic verse, and a reflection on the way in which we use language to form online identities and understand the stories we inhabit.

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2016/project/ainsley-oconnell

Description

Known as the “homepage of the internet,” Reddit abounds in vibrant and sometimes noxious discussions on a wide range of topic-based forums, from the practical (“Swimming”) to the NSFW (“WaterBoobs”) and the obscure (“DarkWaterPhobia”). Through the act of commenting, Reddit members both develop individual online identities and contribute to a modern and still-evolving form of oral storytelling.

In centuries past, epic poetry served a similar purpose. Taking that idea as its starting point, “r/Waves” draws on two of the most famous ancient epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, in concert with Reddit, in order to explore the way in which we continue to use language to define ourselves and establish our place in the world. Water–both Homer's stage and the metaphorical stage for the internet's data “streams”–serves as the poem's backdrop. The project also furthers the literary tradition of  re-exploring Homer through a contemporary perspective.

To accomplish these goals, “r/Waves” creates a corpus based on Reddit forums related to “water”, “wave”, “sea”, and “ocean”, and Homeric lines with those same words. Using a Python script, the poem places words from the corpus into a form text. Please see the next page for excerpts from example outputs.

Classes

Thesis