WRT: Writer Response Theory

online_gaming

not reliant upon
other players unless you choose
to be. i used

The LiveJournal Haiku Meme is a haiku generator with a twist - it is created out of recombinant text drawn from a particular blog. The technique for creating a haiku transforms the text using the following steps:

Blog: RSS: Markov Chain: Syllable Counter: Haiku

Once the LiveJournal blog text has been retrieved via RSS syndication, the words are processed into a discrete Markov chain - essentially a probability table that allows the generator to decide on the next word based what typically follows the previous one, wandering through the text space like a garden of forking paths. The chain is then cut to haiku lengths by the syllable counter, and output returned.

Tags: blogs, generators, poetry

The output is randomized - inputting the same user or group name several times in a row will generate a sequence of different examples. The haiku at the beginning of this post is from the “online_gaming” LJ group (the user name also presumably becomes the title of the haiku), and re-entering it a second time produced:

online_gaming

that much a day to
play. its like this: you have an
army you start with

In general, the most satisfying results are the ones which seem distinctively typical of user or group style, and I found myself rerunning the generator until I landed on one that fit my conception of what the user might say. This has been a frequent comment on reprinted products of generated art - that the editor who generates and finally selects an example is an important coauthor in producing the voice of the generator. In this case, here was my selection for putting the LJ group “int_fiction” into its own words.

int_fiction

obviously went to
some trouble to customize
the game allow you

The Haiku Meme currently only works for extracting LiveJournal RSS feeds based on LJ user name - not on general internet URLs - but one could imagine opening up the Markov chain + syllable counter process to generic RSS feeds, or just raw text. Is there a web service or a downloadable program currently available to do this?

[via thrasymachos]