Rita
From WRTwiki
For a while, we at WRT have been considering the role of authorware. In fact, for a while we have been circling the idea that the authorware determines if not the works to be written the genre of works written. At the same time, we celebrate others who make art through the creative misuse of tools. One group of programmers are making more than just another authoring tool, they are creating a robust environment. In releasing <a href="http://www.processing.org/">Procession 1.0</a>, Ben Fry and Casey marks have created an open source language and environment that offers artists a stepping-stone to programming literacy as well as a visualization space. Daniel Howe's extensive <a href="http://www.rednoise.org/rita/">RiTa toolkit</a> extends their environment into the literary realm.
Processing background:
Processing is like a gateway language, like Logo or Basic for artists. On their site, Fry and Marks state the goal of promoting "software literacy within the visual arts."
In various posts, WRT have argued that if artists are to enter the digital age, they have to move beyond being used by the tools to opening up the tools. Movements to examine "expressive processing," as Noah Wardrip-Fruin would have it, or Critical Code studies, call for an understanding of the working of the software object. The inverse is that artists become more invested in the programming structures
Within their open source development structure, a community has contributed over 70 libraries "to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, and electronics."
Rita's offerings:
According to Rita's website, the toolkit offers:
* Support for probabilistic context-free grammars (CFGs) * Support for generation via Markov (N-Gram) models * Support for KeyWord-In-Context search (see RiKWICker) * Integration with WordNet (here), and JSAPI for text-to-speech * Feature Extraction: Syllables, Phonemes, Stress, Pos, etc. * Constraint-based word substitution (see RiSubstitute) * Support for user-customizable lexicons (RiLexicon) * Web/Text-Mining Capabilities (see RiHtmlParser) * Audio support for RiText objects (see RiSample) * Pluggable 'behavior' model for events/animations etc.
