Computational Poetry
Welcome to the notes for a Computational Poetry Class by Debbie Ding, held at The Substation on 3 November 2016!
Contents
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
A Very Very Brief History of Bots, AI, and Spam
Glossary of Terms used in this page
- HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language. This is a Markup language, not a programming language, which means it is a language used to define the content in a webpage.
- Javascript - is a programming language commonly used with HTML. It is used to create functionality in a webpage.
- AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - which means to use the XMLHttpRequest object to communicate with other server-side scripts. It is "Asynchronous" because it can make new requests to the server without requiring the page to be reloaded, and thus it is used to update the page based on events. This is really useful and is often used to make pages 'responsive', allowing you to design a page that will change accordingly as you resize the browser window.
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.
Mac
Win
Rita and p5.js
== Examples
