Computational Poetry

Welcome to the notes for a Computational Poetry Class by Debbie Ding, held at The Substation on 3 November 2016!

Introduction

This class is designed for people who do not have any programming background but who have an interest in generative poetry and have an open mind to learning some simple methods for non-coders to create their own textual mashups. In this 2 hour class we will cover:

• A Very Very Brief History of Bots, AI, and Spam
• Introduction to RiTa + p5.js
• Setting up a local web server on your computer (Mac/Win)
• Generating a simple 'Singlish Haiku'
• Generating a duologue between Belle (Disney's Beauty and the Beast) and Didi (Waiting for Godot)
• Generating a prose mashup

and hopefully, some time for experimentation!

Equipment required:

• a working laptop (most modern laptops should work)
• wifi connection (which will be available at the substation)
• example files (will be available for download at the class - I'll also have it available on thumbdrives)
• and you! the human input!

Skills required:

• being able to type on a laptop
• being a human

Setting up your own Web Server

Why do you need to set up a "local web server"? If you open up a HTML page in your browser, most browsers restrict how that HTML page can access other resources. For example: A script on http://dbbd.sg can only perform AJAX requests for other files on http://dbbd.sg, but a file on your computer (which we would refer to a a local file) has no domain, and therefore cannot perform any AJAX requests. You would not want pages and scripts from the internet to be able to open or access local files on your computer as that would pose a great security risk.

Rita and p5.js

== Examples