An Expanded Meditation
If you are not familiar with NaNoGenMo: it is an annual challenge to write some code that generates a novel (at least 50,000 words) within the month of November. This was my first year participating! In fact, I nearly did not participate this year either... I started this entry on a whim at 6:30pm on November 30th. 😊
There were a lot of other cool entries this year, which I'd encourage you to check out! If you were drawn to this post by the Melville mention, it may interest you to know that there were not one, but two other Moby Dick themed submissions! One of them takes the novel and blacks out every repetition of a word, and the other colorizes words in the book.
A few more of the other submissions that I thought were especially interesting, in no particular order:
- An Unfinished Novel of 50015 Words, a self-referential novel that I found genuinely funny.
- A Letter Groove, a program that "cuts out" words in scanned book pages to reveal what's beneath (some of the output is really quite beautiful).
- There Are Stars, an interactive story where starring the Github repository causes a new character to be added to the story. Technically not a complete entry because it didn't reach 50,000 words by the end of November, but I think it's one of the most impressive and creative ones I've seen.
- Broken Computer Games, a compilation book of BASIC programs that are composed of mashed-up lines from the book Basic Computer Games by Dave Ahl.
The premise of my submission: In Moby Dick, Ishmael defines a whale as "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail." My generated novel consists of a series of other dubiously accurate whale definitions in the same format, constructed using a tracery grammar. To put together a grammar that had enough word variety to make the output interesting, I pulled from a list of adjectives from Darius Kazemi's corpora repo, as well as many of the "words used to describe" lists published by Macmillan Dictionary. The below excerpt is the beginning of the example output I generated; you can read the full output as well, if you're really that interested in whale definitions.
More generative artAn Expanded Meditation
'Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation.' - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Ch. 32, Cetology.
A whale is a natural animal with a graceful head.
A whale is a cooperative giant with an adorable tail.
A whale is an inexperienced giant with a geometric heart.
A whale is an apprehensive beast with a striped forehead.
A whale is an artificial ungulate with a non-flexible back.
A whale is a grave mammal with a peaked jaw.
A whale is a shrewd mammal with an impermeable belly.
A whale is a ridiculous creature with a chiseled fin.
A whale is an orderly creature with an elongated belly.
A whale is an excitable creature with a graceful hump.
A whale is an artistic fish with a lined set of lungs.
A whale is a caustic leviathan with a mottled stomach.
A whale is a sad beast with an enlarged jaw.
A whale is a suspicious fellow with a concave set of lungs.
A whale is a supercilious mammal with a corrugated hump.
A whale is a drunk animal with a clean rib cage.
A whale is a prejudiced animal with a well-rounded set of lungs.
A whale is a reclusive creature with an eye-catching jaw.
A whale is a willing ungulate with an impermeable fin.
A whale is a cynical animal with an arched forehead.