

Pentametron Reveals Unintended Poetry of Twitter Users - thejteam
http://www.npr.org/2013/02/16/172031066/pentametron-reveals-unintended-poetry-of-twitter-users

======
unimpressive
I'm reminded of the library of babel in Louis Borges fiction. If you generated
every possible iambic meter poem and then sifted through them with some
mechanism (like crowdsourcing), you could probably find some winners.

~~~
nswanberg
That sounds like what happens with poets and collected culture now--a poet
looking to create a poem searches their memory for experience, chooses a form,
and after some revisions produces a work. That work is then shopped around,
sometimes in formal ways like a publisher, or informal through friends, and
through time civilization filters and canonized certain poems, forever adding
to, updating, and removing works from the list.

It seems possible, though certainly not easy, to mechanize some or all of
that.

~~~
unimpressive
Exactly, poetry has enough structure that unlike regular English prose, it
seem plausible that you could get meaningful output from a computer program.

Then again, meaningful output isn't exactly necessary.[0]

[0]: <http://www.ubu.com/historical/racter/index.html>

------
davidvaughan
This is very clever.

love watching people do the Harlem shake

I really really really want a snake

How does it work? I'm guessing it 1) scans tweets for pentameters using a
large corpus annotated by syllables, then 2) looks up a rhyming dictionary to
check the tweet is likely to be fruitful (i.e. doesn't end with the word
orange or similar) and 3) waits...

~~~
klenwell
Here's some pythonesque pseudo-code that might do it:

    
    
        for tweet in twitter_api.latest_tweets():
            phonetic_tweet = convert_tweet_to_phonemes(tweet)
            
            if is_iambic(phonetic_tweet):
                end_rhymes = extract_end_rhymes(phonetic_tweet)
                db.insert_iambic_tweet(tweet, end_rhymes)
                
                for end_rhyme in end_rhymes:
                    rhyming_tweets = db.select_rhyming_tweets(end_rhyme)
                    if rhyming_tweets:
                        rhyming_tweet = random.choice(rhyming_tweets)
                        return [tweet, rhyming_tweet]
    

There are several open source word lists out there that make this feasible.

------
gojomo
Has anyone made a text editor optimized for poetic verse?

It'd automatically highlight syllable counts (and alternate the coloring of
syllable-letter-groups within words). It'd indicate with bolding, underline,
or other annotation stressed syllables. (Simple heuristics would get a lot
right, and authors could correct the mistakes.) It could help with rhymes and
near-rhymes. (I know there are already a lot of tools for this.)

Would make a nice web app.

~~~
Wingman4l7
I don't know if this one does all those things, but it's been featured here:

Show HN: An IDE for poets (<http://tranquillpoet.com>)
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4775886>

------
mnicole
Someone posted Pantametron when <http://www.140verses.com/discover> was posted
last week or so. Both are strangely delightful.

------
kandalf
Reminds me of SlamWhale (2011) [1], but the added meter rules makes it even
better.

[1] <http://www.slamwhale.com/>

