Fred Truman
Design & Code Creative
Reading and Writing Electronic Text – Week 04
February 21, 2011
The assignment:
The digital cut-up. Write a program that reads in and creatively re-arranges the content of one or more source texts. What is the unit of your cut-up technique? (the word, the line, the character? something else?) How does your procedure relate (if at all) to your choice of source text? Feel free to build on your assignment from last week.
Your program must make use of at least one set, dictionary, or list.
Despite last week’s enthusiasm for the reading, I’m finding it difficult to let go of legibility and coherence in my mung. Instead of trying to make a cut-up, I tried to make a program that accepts two texts and returns a hyper-condensed synthesis of their common theme. I decided to parse each text to return a set of its adjectives and a separate set for its adverbs. Then, I find the intersection of adverbs and adjectives and print out a random sampling in this format:
[adjective].
[adjective].
[adverb] [adjective].
The result should be ambiguous enough to summarize either or both or the texts. For this example I’ve used The Scarlet Letter and The Call of the Wild. Running the program from the command line returns stuff like:
YOUNG.
MOURNFUL.
INEVITABLY SHRILL.
or:
INARTICULATE.
FORLORN.
PARTLY SUFFICIENT.
or even:
ENORMOUS.
DYING.
VIOLENTLY LONELY.
Another fun pairing might be Common Sense and The Communist Manifesto, which gives you stuff like:
SUPERSTITIOUS.
UNFIT.
SERIOUSLY SERIOUS.
or:
DIFFERING.
ABLE.
SOLEMNLY POLITICAL
This pairing isn’t so good, but it doesn’t matter because you can always just try another!