Led by Allison Parrish
Practitioners in the field of procedural writing have been using rules, procedures and computer programs to create innovative literary work since the invention of the digital computer. Far from the bland imitation evoked by the phrase "computer-generated poetry," these techniques facilitate the creation of work with aesthetic and emotional affordances sometimes difficult to achieve through conventional compositional techniques: serendipitous beauty, precisely imitative satire, vertiginous wonder at the infinite. In this workshop, participants will learn about the history of computer-generated writing and sample a range of off-the-shelf, freely-available tools on the web to create their own—without writing any actual lines of code. No previous programming experience is required.
- My work
- Procedural writing throughout the ages
- Text as raw material
- Looking for some text to work with? Project Gutenberg and The Internet Archive's Text section are great places to find text in the public domain.
- Cleaning text and sketching with words using TextMechanic
- Corpora, concordances, search engines, including Gutenberg Poetry Autocomplete
- Other generative tools using text analysis: edde addad's charNG and Doug Luman's Applied Poetics
- Generate text from grammars with Tracery. My Tracery tutorial; here's Beau Gunderson's Tracery Writer, which we'll use in the workshop
- Lines to JSON is a little utility I made that formats lines of plain text as JSON, to make it easier to incorporate them into a Tracery grammar.
- Darius Kazemi's Corpora Project is a database JSON files with various lists of things that you can easily cut and paste into a Tracery grammar.
- Make something and add it to the Workshop Zine.
- Other places to share your work online:
- Darius Kazemi's GenGen (turn lists of words into a madlib-style web-based generator)
- If you know a tiny bit of HTML, make a website for your work with NeoCities
- We won't cover this in the workshop, but once you've written a Tracery grammar, you can turn it into a Twitter bot instantly with Cheap Bots Done Quick