12/18/14

Allison Parrish - computer-generated novel based on a dream dictionary





Allison Parrish, I Waded In Clear Water  download

Hello There

I'm Allison.
This is the repository for my NaNoGenMo 2014 entry, I Waded In Clear Water (pdf).

The procedure

(Taken from the Preface)
This novel was generated from the text of Gustavus Hindman Miller's Ten Thousand Dreams, Interpreted. The "What's In A Dream" section of Miller's book functions as a dream dictionary: you look up a word, and find out what it means to dream about that word's referent. Each word has multiple interpretations, and most of these interpretations can be broken down into what I call an action and a denotation:
To see an oak full of acorns, denotes increase and promotion.
In this entry, See an oak full of acorns is the action, and increase and promotion is the denotation. The text of this novel was made by extracting the actions and changing them to first-person, past-tense sentences:
I saw an oak full of acorns.
The denotation for each action is scored using a sentiment analysis algorithm, and the sentences are printed in order by the sentiment of their corresponding denotation, from most negative to most positive. (According to the sentiment analysis algorithm, the first sentence of the novel, "I saw a healthy belly," is the worst thing that can happen in a dream; the last sentence, "I waded in clear water," is the best thing.)
Elaborations, in the form of footnotes, are provided for many sentences. These elaborations are generated using information in ConceptNet (in particular, the IsA, HasProperty, and AtLocation relations) and WordNet (for part-of-speech checks, synonyms, and antonyms).

This repository

This repository contains the Python code I wrote to generate my NaNoGenMo 2014 entry. It's very rough and hacky but I wanted to make it available to any curious onlookers.
Usage:
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python extract.py draft.tex
This generates a LaTeX file, which you can render with the LaTeX tools of your choice! (I used TeXShop.)
The file final.tex contains my final output as submitted to NaNoGenMo, and final.pdf is the rendered PDF.

License

The text of the novel is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
The source code is distributed under an MIT license. See LICENSE for details.


www.decontextualize.com/

Game design-related one-offs and bagatelles:
Here are some cool projects I’ve helped create as a collaborator or hired hand:
  • Tagnic, a Twitter game about building a friend folksonomy (as programmer)
  • Kriegspiel, a videogame adaptation of a war game desiged by Guy Debord (as programmer)
  • Kitchen Caravan, an online cooking show and food blog (as programmer)
For information on other stuff I’ve been working on, see my portfolio site or my ITP blog. I also occasionally upload video of works in progress to Vimeo.
Press:

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