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/

• New Interfaces for Textual Expression (my masters thesis project at ITP)
• Lexcavator, an arcade/word game for Mac/PC/Linux
• Introduction to Tornado (as co-author), a beginner’s guide to the much celebrated Python web application framework, published by O’Reilly
• APxD mkII: Autonomous Parapoetic Device
• Legend of the Tomb of Fate: a generative old-school BBS door-style dungeon crawler
• Earl Grey, a game about word play, co-written and developed with Rob Dubbin (Baf’s Guide review)
• twitter.com/everyword: tweeting every word in the English language (or, at least, every word from an extensive English word list). At the current rate of one word every thirty minutes, the project will be completed in 2014. Here’s an essay I wrote on @everyword’s goals and motivations.
• POWER VOCAB TWEET, a Twitter account that posts randomly generated words and definitions. Infinite generative sniglets.
• Frotzophone: making music with interactive fiction
• Byte Organ (with Andy Doro): making the structure of data audible
• Critical Responses to Cave of Time: What would a Choose Your Own Adventure book look like without the choice? What would it look like with too much choice?
• Analog Text Display: an experiment in alternate text display and encoding technologies
• Filthy Ditty: one experimental text a day during the month of May, 2011 (previously: Texty Text: one experimental text a day during the month of February, 2008)
• The Invention of Murder: a Big Game
• Rewordable: freely available word-building card game
• Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans (with Leonard Richardson): a guidebook for an Alien language. (Further thoughts and commentary)
• twbasic: a BASIC interpreter for Twitter
• Characterror, a word game that you can play on your computer!
• Winter: I made this ZZT game when I was still in high school and I’m still pretty happy with it.
• Speaking of ZZT, I recently made a ZZT game with Rob Dubbin called International Jetpack Conference. As featured on IndieGames.com!
• @eventuallybot, which generates short narrative films in GIF format, sourced from randomly selected YouTube clips. I wrote about my motivation and methodology.

Game design-related one-offs and bagatelles:

• Sexy Windsurfing, an automated agent for playing popular word game Apples to Apples
• Subwoofer Tactics (with C. Anderson Miller): a game of ear protection and loud noises
• Humans Hanging Out (with Rob Dubbin, Jelani John and Tim Gardner): a conversation game wherein a robot must convince humans that it has passed the Turing test (made for the 2010 Global Game Jam)
• Which describes how you’re feeling all the time, a short piece of interactive fiction (?) made for Apollo 18+20, the They Might Be Giants IF tribute album
• Snaquia is a “cover version” of Skip Ltd.’s Aquia, made with PuzzleScript. Written up by Forest Ambassador!

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:

• Frotzophone: Rocketboom, Networked Music Review, The Fiction Circus
• Autonomous Parapoetic Device: Make: Blog, Grand Text Auto (Frank Lantz: “It’s a suspicious device.”)
• New Interfaces for Textual Expression: Grand Text Auto (Ian Bogost: “These are just excellent.”)
• @everyword: Gawker, Washington Post
• Reading and Writing Electronic Text: ReadWriteWeb
• Lexcavator: jayisgames.com, indiegames.com