Reading and Writing Electronic Text

This week, we learned to generate text with pre-trained models and the usage of Transformer. I continued my form generator from assignment #3, which used Tracery to generate questions that we see on forms. 

little recap from the output last time:

Later, the questions generated from Tracery get passed on to Transformer to serve as prompts, and the generated text becomes the answer to those form questions. 

Some examples of the output

This ‘auto-fill’ content adds another layer of dissonance and alienation. The format of ‘form’ is almost unrecognizable without the hint of vow statement and signature. This form and its content become almost a sole creation of the computer (and ofc, I), which kind of delivers what I feel towards most of the bureaucratic forms and procedures. 

→→gist

→ → gist

Using Spacy and Tracery, I revisited the digital cut-up I did in #2, and experimented more with what we’ve learned in the past few weeks. 

Inspired by Peter Handke’s poem “Song of a Childhood”, I started the experiment with the “When…” structure. This is the first rough draft, which one can tell the story by the key words and characters, even the paragraphs did not form a clear narrative.

Then I tried to place the main characters (Lord, Adam, Eve, the serpent) in the main clause, followed by three clauses. In the end, I kept only Eve in the main clause, it started to look like another story told only from Eve’s perspective. This opens up another space to explore around –  the Garden of Eden before the incident happened, the Behind the Scene, etc. 

#1

#2

#3

This week our prompt was to study a genre or a form of writing: link to GIST

The form I chose was “form”, as in forms of information or documents. It has little beauty in language and could scarcely be seen as literature. However, it indicates a lot of social contexts and points out the identity of an individual (or even, what symbols an individual and what not?) As an international student, I have been in numerous process of applications to move to America – Visa, bank accounts, Social Security Number, etc. These forms are filled with authoritative words that I could hardly understand, not to mention imagining the consequence of any violations. 

Some exemplars –

At the beginning, I was trying to recreate a generator for those forms. To me, the random selection of words recreated the detached feelings I have for those forms. Skimming through the whole paper, usually I do not question the reason for the requests of my information, and skip through all the small texts and notes. And sometimes, the questions can be confusing too. For example, employed address, does that mean the address I will be working at, or the address of mine, the employed? 

Department of Immigration Services 
Country enrolled: _________ 
Hours per week estimated: _________ 
Current contact pursuing: _________ 
Preferred type: _________ 
Work country: _________ 
Designated type employed: _________ 
Hours per week of approval: _________ 
Country issued: _________ 
Status employed: _________ 
Current applicant: _________ 

I assure that, under penalty of perjury, that I have understand the statements. 
Signature _____________

Then I started to play around more by using ‘rules within rules’ that Allison mentioned last class, to make the whole thing even more alienating. 

Department of Career Development

	Second alien: _________
	Earliest document country: _________
	First work enrolled: _________
	Preferred position: _________
	Second approval: _________
	Registration that estimated document applicant approval number organization of alien that estimated date birth: _________
	Current organization of hours per week that enrolled hours per week of registration: _________
	Second official of program: _________
	Contact: _________
	First extension: _________

I assure that, under penalty of perjury, that I have understand the documents of void.

Signature _____________

Github link

In this week’s cut up practice, I made a poem ( or composition) out of the story of Eden’s Garden form the Bible.

One of my experiments was to remove God from this story. I replaced god with the word “someone”, and that changed the whole dynamic and authoritative feel of the story.

I had a lot of fun replacing words. However, to make these texts into poetry structure, I struggled a lot with lists and strings, and the functions that companies these two types of objects. I spent most of the time correcting errors of syntax and navigating my way through Jupyter notebook. (It is when I realize the importance to name variables properly) I am also still trying to figure out the difference between a for loop, and the for loop written in square brackets. So this week, I mostly tried to select words based on their length and played around with the composition of space. In the following weeks, as I am more familiar with Python syntax, I would love to try more variations on this topic.

In this version, two of my favorite lines are “woman deceived God” and “fruit deceived Adam”. Even though the poem is not that smooth in its narrative right now, I find it interesting that the juxtaposition of the characters provide a context strong enough already for readers to fill the story, or even to create another version of the original story.

i woman
    coverings, crush     garments 

has heard
    thistles, taken
               deceived Adam

and birth
    desirable, sewed garments God

of naked
    pleasing, woman
               commanded 

you sword
    commanded, which  desirable 

his fruit
    commanded, woman deceived God

of until
    cherubim, fruit  garments 

the woman
    deceived, fruit deceived Adam

be touch
    certainly, woman  themselves God

you guard
    thistles, forth  childbearing Adam