Thursday, December 06, 2007
The chicken is the egg (or is it the other way round?)
With the release of the ETC source, the basic problem of an architecture for generating poetic texts is a solved problem. So then how come the texts still fall a bit short as examples of poetic speech?
Because....
It's not just the generational software that makes the poem, but the grammar(s) the software uses to guide its semantic and syntactic choices.
As I've said many times on this blog, Etc3 uses an LTAG approach. There are all kinds of advantages to using LTAG, not the least of which is how easy it lends itself to description via Xml. The trick is what sorts of grammatical units are poetic.
There is a Sylvia Plath line with the phrase "Between this wish and that wish." (And again, I don't care for her work, but it has readily observable poetic markers that serve well as the basis for experimentation.) Now that phrase poses interesting technical challenges. Between and and are easy. We just treat those as lexical nodes. It's this wish and that wish that are problematic. To define these in a tree, we need a repetition node, which at first looks easy, but has a couple of boobie traps. Basically the repetition node searches down from its root for a node with a target ID and then requests of that node its terminal string. The repetition node cares not a lick for the grammar of that node, just its surface. So far so good. But this and that aren't so nonchalant. They have to agree with their head nouns. But the second doesn't link to anything, because its associated node is all and only surface. And they have to be opposites. The solution is to link the demonstratives so that the second thinks its determining the first wish, but change the reference from near to far. Whew.....
Lots of fun.
But the utility of the phrase is limited. How many times can you say between "this X and that X" before the phrase becomes repetitive. Not often. So as much fun as it might have been to code and as useful as it was for thinking about poetic text generation design, we're probably going to trash it.
The thing is, you can never know the affect of a construction until you see its realization within the context of an individual piece and the context of a body of work.
Keep those cards and letters comin', folks!
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
After Prufrock
Monday, December 03, 2007
Sigh....
Every time I deploy a new Etc3, I blow off the poems it's done since the last release. I'm sure someone can theorize about this--you know, something about temporality vs. the temporary within the context of the unread. Or how doing so makes of transience a poetic trait, that what's not there is the essence of what is. Or that such fleeting text is representative of the short shelf life of all things computational, demeaning itself within itself because of itself, the self that can only be not other and can never be as such anything else, the ultimate self-defacing unknowable. Whatever. (Like I care--the real reason is that new releases are deployed because they work better so why hold on to the less better texts--let's flood the world with more better stuff, better that the previous better.)
Anyway. After every new release, someone, sooner or later, thinks it must be cute or clever (or whatever) to seed the MACHINE with obscenities. (Maybe they just want to see if they can make Erica blush.) The most recent, "Like a dear," was initiated from a referral from The Poetry Foundation.
And here we thought folks who visited that site were somehow beyond that sort of thing. Not that the word fuck hasn't its aesthetic uses, but come on....... Every fucking time?
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Appreciating users
We got a mention over at the Poetry Foundation. What's interesting to me is the comment, "I kept crashing Erica when I gave her my own topics."
The reason is that the user didn't click the "Add stanza" button before clicking the "Compose poem" button. One reaction (a very common one) on the part of the developer is that the cause should be obvious (and if it isn't, RTFM!).
But that's extremely shortsighted (and more than a little narcissistic). I've gotten a few messages from users who have run into the same problem. When multiple users encounter this kind of issue, it's not their fault--it is (and only is) the fault of the developer. Having to prep a system is a reflection of a developer's world view (that the user is in control), which is usually quite far removed from the way "normal" folk actually think and respond to software.
My mistake (purely a function of laziness) was in not guiding the user to an answer to this problem, a mistake I have corrected in a newly deployed directed-poetics page. Very simple to do--just pop up an alert if the user clicks "Compose poem" without first creating stanzas and return to the form.
This kind of thing happens all the time in commercial applications, but as often as not, developers just use such occurrences as reinforcement for the disdain in which they hold users, the very folks who are paying them.
And we wonder why people don't like working with software programmers!
