Concept
For this week’s assignment, I knew right off the bat that I wanted to do something with poetry. Having felt inspired by Camille Utterback’s Text Rain piece, I thought that an unexpected poem concept would be interesting and originally wanted to use a database of google searches to generate poetry. However, after not finding any databases that struck my interest I decided to take a break and come back to the assignment later. It was then that I started writing a poem inspired by the feeling of being homesick that I ended up having my idea. In the poem, I kind of jumped around a bit as I dissected how my homesickness portrayed itself in my life and ended up getting the idea of a word web. From there I decided that I wanted lines from my poem to connect to other random lines from poems I’d gathered on the internet.
Components
Because I was somewhat combining the database option with the generative text output I decided I wanted to keep the design of both aspects to be relatively simple so as to keep my expectations fairly realistic. However, even what I thought would be simple to execute, took a lot of trial-and-error / re-starting for simplicity. Generating the typewriter like output is pretty simple in the code but took a lot of planning and replanning on my part as I kept getting stuck with the line breaks, and how the words were being stored.
Once I got that rolling I wanted to focus on how I would incorporate the database of poetry. I ended up creating a few different methods so that I could randomly generate information in my poem, and then have it located in the provided poems. Then, just for an aesthetic component I imported a font so that each line of poetry had a bit more uniqueness to it and added visual aspect. You can also click the mouse to generate more words with different excerpt of the poems which I think further instils the idea of how everything is connected in some megaweb (even in ways we could never imagine)
An Aspect I Am Proud Of
I think in writing this program I put more of my ‘programming skills’ to the test than I have in the past. I needed to spend a lot of time on the design process because after hitting a few dead ends I realized the importance my algorithm played into the functionality of my code. Although this is not the part I struggled the most with, I’d like to highlight my functions to generate the random words and phrases seen below.
function randomWord() {
let randLine = lines[int(random(0,23))]; //choose a line from my poem
let words = split(randLine, ' '); //make each word
//an element in an array
let chosenWord = words[int(random(0, words.length))];
//choosing a random word from the random line
wordInData(chosenWord); //find it in the data set
}
function wordInData(chosenWord) {
let attempts = 0; //preventing max stack call error
while (attempts < 1000) {
let randomDataLine = dataPoems[int(random(0,dataPoems.length))];
let words = split(randomDataLine, ' ');
//doing the same thing from my poem
if (words.includes(chosenWord)) { //if random word is found
magazineLine = randomDataLine;
return; //stops the function from continue
}
attempts++;
}
// If no match found after maxAttempts, choose a random line
// = random(dataPoems);
randomWord();
}
I chose to highlight this code because it took me quite a long time to figure out how to parse the data from both text files to make them into arrays I could work with (although in the end it ended up being quite simply I just didn’t understand the structure of loading files).
Final Product (double click for the random poetry!)
(Also I know from this week’s reading that we should have to explicitly say what to do for it to be good design and user-friendly but Rome wasn’t built in a day!!!)
Reflection
This excerpt however, also brings me to what I’d like to improve about the program. I’m still not really sure if this is an issue with the data set of my program or just poor design on my part but I was running into a maximum stack error when attempting to find words in the data set of poems. Because the program would iterate over 1,000 times trying to find a word, it would end up crashing would also created a lot of stress and wasted time.
Therefore, in the future I’d like to find the root of the issue and redesign the program so that it is solved. Although I am proud of what I designed because of how far I came in terms of hardcoding my version, I know that this algorithm is far from ideal and definitely want to tweak it. Furthermore, I’d love to make it more interactive with maybe the user choosing a word to search for instead of the program generating it for them but just hadn’t gotten that far conceptually with this version.