The Voynichese project (VP) defines a simple syntax for querying words in the Voynich Manuscript. While this syntax is only used internally, by the VP's query processor, it's important to be aware of how it operates in order to effectively query the manuscript.
Note that, unlike most query languages, Voynichese queries are evaluated at the word level. As such, word delimiters like whitespace and punctuation are not allowed.
Voynichese queries may use the following characters:
a,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,v,x,y,z,*,^,$
The characters a-z each match the corresponding EVA character.
The wildcard character "*" matches one or more EVA characters. Note that the wildcard may also be represented as a dash "-", for example when used in an URL.
The "^" character matches the start of a word.
The "$" character matches the end of a word.
For example, the query ^daiin$ will exactly match the EVA word daiin, whereas the query daiin (excluding the ^ and $ symbols) will match any EVA word containing daiin, such as chodaiindy.
Simon Popper, Ulysses, [a reinterpretation of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) rearranging all the words in the original book in alphabetical order], Privately Printed by Die Keure, Brugge/Bruges, 2006, Limited Edition of 1000 [Motto Books, Geneva]
A showcase with creative machine learning experiments
Comprehensive overview of existing tools, strategies and thoughts on interacting with your data
TLDR: when I read I try to read actively, which for me mainly involves using various tools to annotate content: highlight and leave notes as I read. I've programmed data providers that parse them and provide nice interface to interact with this data from other tools. My automated scripts use them to render these annotations in human readable and searchable plaintext and generate TODOs/spaced repetition items.
In this post I'm gonna elaborate on all of that and give some motivation, review of these tools (mainly with the focus on open source thus extendable software) and my vision on how they could work in an ideal world. I won't try to convince you that my method of reading and interacting with information is superior for you: it doesn't have to be, and there are people out there more eloquent than me who do that. I assume you want this too and wondering about the practical details.
Blackout poetry is made by colouring over parts of an existing text, so that only selected words remain visible, creating a poem.
To use this tool, you can select a text from the samples, or paste your own text source into the custom text field. Your chosen text will appear in the large box to the right.
With your mouse or touchscreen, select the words from the text you want to keep, and, when you are ready, press the black out button.
If you want to save the result as an image, maybe to post to your social network of choice, scroll down and hit Render as image. You can then save the image directly to your device.
Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) was a French writer, closely associatd with the surrealists.
Cent mille milliards de poèmes is a book of ten poems. From them you can create 100,000,000,000,000 properly-formed sonnets.
Queneau was a founder of OULIPO, a group devoted to exploring and playing with language.
The book's exraordinary. Treat yourself. It's published by Gallimard and still in print.
This site is an English translation
You can see the basic poems or random poems, assemble your own poem or run a slide show.
New poems can be formed by replacing lines with any line that rhymes
Background material throws light on Queneau, the book and the translation. The poems are annotated.
Pataphysics is perhaps best (mis)understood by looking at some of its recurring themes, such as exceptions, syzygies, anomalies, clinamen, antinomies, contradictions, equivalents and imaginaries.
Clinamen
The term clinamen was first coined by Lucretius when he needed to name the aleatory swerve of atoms in their descent described by Epicurus. Approximately two millennia later, Alfred Jarry resurrected this obscured concept as a key principle of pataphysics. Its influences can be found in the Situationists’ détournement, the Dadaists’ ready-mades and Oulipo’s verbal games, and so on. Lucretius had already linked the indeterministic property of the clinamen to free will and the Oulipo interprets it as a chance to escape certain restrictions given that any initial constraint are still followed (just as the atoms don’t randomly start to ascend but they swerve). Experimental poet Christian Bök has called the clinamen the smallest possible aberration that can make the greatest possible difference.
One good example of a clinamen in action is Jarry’s merdre (the very first word in his Ubu play). He squeezed an extra ‘r’ into the French word ‘merde’ (meaning shit) and translates into something like ‘pshit’. By rendering a useful (if rude) word useless in this way, he introduced a pataphysical sense of creativity that persists: the word still exerts a fascination today.
Syzygy
A syzygy both surprises and confuses. The concept originally comes from the field of astronomy where it denotes the alignment of three celestial bodies. In a pataphysical context it usually describes a conjunction of things, something unexpected and surprising. Unlike serendipity, a simple chance encounter, the syzygy has a more scientific purpose. A typical instance is the pun, which Jarry called the syzygy of words. Next to being intentionally funny, puns demonstrate a clever use (or abuse) of grammar, syntax, pronunciation and/or semantics, often taken to a quite scientific level, such that without understanding of what is said and what the intended meaning is, the humour of the pun might be lost.
Antinomy
The antinomy, in a pataphysical sense, is the mutually incompatible or paradox. Mutually contradictory opposites can and do co-exist in the pataphysical universe.
Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) is without doubt the prime exponent of pataphysics. The word pataphysics was invented by him and some of his schoolmates in France in the 1880s and Jarry elaborated on that initial idea, both in his celebrated Ubu plays and in his novels and speculative writings. He has been described as a poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, artist, eccentric, alcoholic and sometimes even a lunatic.
Technical details
In short, the tool reads in a library of plaintext files, and creates an index (a dictionary type data structure storing the vocabulary of the whole corpus together with a list that contains all documents and positions of the term within the document in the vocabulary). There are two collections of texts to choose from, either the Faustroll corpus or the Shakespeare corpus at this point.
Index:
{word1: [[fileA, posa], [fileB, posb], ...], word2: [[fileC, posc], [fileK, posk], ...], ... }
All texts in the corpus are read into memory and processed, for example any stopwords of the source language are removed.
Once a user submits a query, various important functions are triggered. First, the three patalgorithms are run to populate a list of results to be rendered.
Results:
[(title, (pre, word, post), algorithm), ...]
Each algorithm pataphysicalises the original query term in its own way and looks for matches in the index.
Results are presented in one of three ways. The default is the poetry view. It displays 14 lines of text, each of which can be changed to another iff more results are available. This is heavily inspried by Raymond Queneau's 'Cent mille milliards de poèmes'. The other two options show the results either sorted by their source or by the algorithm by which they were generated.
Writing Machines is a resource dedicated to various projects related to electronic literature/books/writing/art curated by Julia Garcia
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization, established by fans in 2007, to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate.
We are proactive and innovative in protecting and defending our work from commercial exploitation and legal challenge. We preserve our fannish economy, values, and creative expression by protecting and nurturing our fellow fans, our work, our commentary, our history, and our identity while providing the broadest possible access to fannish activity for all fans.
Literary analysts have long noticed the hand of another author in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Now a neural network has identified the specific scenes in question—and who actually wrote them.
For much of his life, William Shakespeare was the house playwright for an acting company called the King’s Men that performed his plays on the banks of the River Thames in London. When Shakespeare died in 1616, the company needed a replacement and turned to one of the most prolific and famous playwrights of the time, a man named John Fletcher.
Utility library to easily connect to RunwayML from Processing
Feel free to replace this paragraph with a description of the Library.
Contributed Libraries are developed, documented, and maintained by members of the Processing community. Further directions are included with each Library. For feedback and support, please post to the Discourse. We strongly encourage all Libraries to be open source, but not all of them are.
https://github.com/runwayml/processing-library
Installation
Download https://github.com/runwayml/processing-library/releases/download/latest/RunwayML.zip
Unzip into Documents > Processing > libraries
Restart Processing (if it was already running)
Demonstration tutorial of retraining OpenAI’s GPT-2-small (a text-generating Transformer neural network) on a large public domain Project Gutenberg poetry corpus to generate high-quality English verse.
https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-gpt2/
Other tutorial : https://medium.com/@ngwaifoong92/beginners-guide-to-retrain-gpt-2-117m-to-generate-custom-text-content-8bb5363d8b7f
https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-simple
Example : http://textsynth.org/
Datasets :
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets
https://github.com/awesomedata/awesome-public-datasets
Scrap webpage with python :
https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
https://github.com/EugenHotaj/beatles/blob/master/scraper.py
Built by Adam King (@AdamDanielKing) as an easier way to play with OpenAI's new machine learning model. In February, OpenAI unveiled a language model called GPT-2 that generates coherent paragraphs of text one word at a time.
Welcome to Planet eBook, the home of free classic literature! The latest version of the site, with its mobile-friendly design and multi-format eBooks, attempts to make our collection of eBooks available on all devices.
Existing free eBooks on the web tend to be well beneath the quality of paper books, making them more difficult and less pleasurable to read. In a small way, we’re trying to change this. Our goal is to publish a small selection of high-quality eBooks — each a genuine alternative for readers wanting to enjoy reading a book without having to pay for it.
The books we publish in Australia are all in the public domain and out of copyright. Please be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading.
Richard
Beats is a command-line drum machine. Feed it a song notated in YAML, and it will produce a precision-milled Wave file of impeccable timing and feel.
http://beatsdrummachine.com/tutorial/
http://tropone.de/2019/02/21/ungewoehnliche-wege-rhythmen-zu-programmieren-teil-2-beats-cl/
Each letter of the alphabet is an operation, lowercase letters operate on bang, uppercase letters operate each frame. Orca is designed to control other applications, create procedural sequencers, and to experiment with livecoding. See the documentation and installation instructions here, or have a look at a tutorial video.
A
add: Outputs the sum of inputs.B
bool: Bangs if input is not empty, or 0.C
clock: Outputs a constant value based on the runtime frame.D
delay: Bangs on a fraction of the runtime frame.E
east: Moves eastward, or bangs.F
if: Bangs if both inputs are equal.G
generator: Writes distant operators with offset.H
halt: Stops southward operators from operating.I
increment: Increments southward operator.J
jumper: Outputs the northward operator.K
konkat: Outputs multiple variables.L
loop: Loops a number of eastward operators.M
modulo: Outputs the modulo of input.N
north: Moves Northward, or bangs.O
offset: Reads a distant operator with offset.P
push: Writes an eastward operator with offset.Q
query: Reads distant operators with offset.R
random: Outputs a random value.S
south: Moves southward, or bangs.T
track: Reads an eastward operator with offset.U
uturn: Reverses movement of inputs.V
variable: Reads and write globally available variables.W
west: Moves westward, or bangs.X
teleport: Writes a distant operator with offset.Y
jymper: Outputs the westward operator.Z
zoom: Moves eastwardly, respawns west on collision.*
bang: Bangs neighboring operators.#
comment: Comments a line, or characters until the next hash.:
midi: Sends a MIDI note.^
cc: Sends a MIDI CC value.;
udp: Sends a UDP message.=
osc: Sends a OSC message.enter
bang selected operator.shift+enter
toggle insert/write.space
toggle play/pause.>
increase BPM.<
decrease BPM.shift+arrowKey
Expand cursor.ctrl+arrowKey
Leap cursor.alt+arrowKey
Move selection.ctrl+c
copy selection.ctrl+x
cut selection.ctrl+v
paste selection.ctrl+z
undo.ctrl+shift+z
redo.]
increase grid size vertically.[
decrease grid size vertically.}
increase grid size horizontally.{
decrease grid size horizontally.ctrl/meta+]
increase program size vertically.ctrl/meta+[
decrease program size vertically.ctrl/meta+}
increase program size horizontally.ctrl/meta+{
decrease program size horizontally.ctrl+=
Zoom In.ctrl+-
Zoom Out.ctrl+0
Zoom Reset.tab
Toggle interface.backquote
Toggle background.Download the app here : https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/orca
Source code : https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca
Video tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaI_TuISSJE
To test midi on Macosx : http://notahat.com/simplesynth
Activate the virtual Midi input on Macosx : https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209774225-Using-virtual-MIDI-buses
Pilot (another way to create music with orca from the same creators) :
Download the app here : https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/pilot
Source code : https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Pilot
A good explanation of the software in German : http://tropone.de/2019/03/13/orca-ein-sequenzer-der-kryptischer-nicht-aussehen-kann-und-ein-versuch-einer-anleitung/
You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.
Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.
Twine was originally created by Chris Klimas in 2009 and is now maintained by a whole bunch of people at several different repositories.
Naming is hard. Names, after all, are perhaps the most indelible artifacts of the product creation process. Brands are redesigned with a lustrum regularity and codebases are continually rewritten and replaced but a name, for better or worse, usually sticks.
That’s because a good name is a hook that sets itself into a person’s mind, linking their brain back to your idea – try to reset the hook and you risk losing the connection. The process of naming, then, is the process of neatly packaging up that idea, discovering where it begins and ends so it can be linked as a discrete, easily remembered concept.
A good name can help a company or product become successful, of course, but it can also help the lowliest code library find an audience, help formalize an informal process, and propel ideas about the world toward becoming talking points throughout it.
And yet, what tools do we use for naming? What methodology? Many of us practice it informally, doing our best with thesauruses and domain name searches, never stopping to formalize an approach because it seems so devilishly simple – all you really need is a word or two in a language you’ve probably been using your entire life.
But like any art form, naming benefits from rich tools and processes, and this site is meant to help you discover them – to provide a starting point for anyone who needs to name something. That is: everyone, because every idea benefits from a good name.
REXPaint is a powerful and user-friendly ASCII art editor. Use a wide variety of tools to create ANSI block/line art, roguelike mockups and maps, UI layouts, and for other game development needs. Originally an in-house dev tool used by Grid Sage Games for traditional roguelike development, this software has been made available to other developers and artists free of charge. While core functionality and tons of features already exist, occasional updates are known to happen.
AI research that touches on dialogue and story generation. As before, I’m picking a few points of interest, summarizing highlights, and then linking through to the detailed research.
This one is about a couple of areas of natural language processing and generation, as well as sentiment understanding, relevant to how we might realize stories and dialogue with particular surface features and characteristics.
We call them "seeds". Each seed is a machine learning example you can start playing with. Explore, learn and grow them into whatever you like.
L'Ouvroir de Génération Procédurale (OuGéPro) est un ensemble d'outils absurdes, d'algorithmes inutiles et de bots idiots visant à la production de textes insensés, créé par Ambroise Garel pour la Chaothèque.
https://chaotheque.org/ougepro/cuisinotron
INGRÉDIENTS
– 12 billes de mozzarella
– 400g de Nutella
PRÉPARATION
– Frottez la mozzarella avec un citron
– Frottez le Nutella avec un citron
– Versez la mozzarella sur le Nutella
– Malaxez à la main pendant 70 minutes
– Placez le tout dans un pain pita
Gian-Carlo Rota is professor of applied mathematics and
philosophy at MIT.
This article has appeared electronically in
Concerns of Young Mathematicians, Volume 4, Issue 25, August 21, 1996, a publication of the Young Mathematicians Net-work.
The article is based on a talk delivered on the occasion
of the Rotafest in April, 1996, and is reprinted with per-
mission of Birkhauser Boston, copyright 1997, ISBN 0-
8176-3866-0, Indiscrete Thoughts by Gian-Carlo Rota, edited by Fabrizio Palombi.
A Physical Book makes a digitized book “physical” by rendering it in a simulated space where properties like gravity, friction, and velocity all apply. The program randomly perturbs the letters, then takes a snapshot at a point in time, re-assembling the images into a new, “un-digitized” book.
The raw, uncorrected scanned text of The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book: 400 Ways to Make a Sandwich (1909) is re-imagined as this 251 page (50,964 words) book:
A Physical Book uses the web-based game engine Phaser. Each page of the book is rendered into an invisible <div>
(to produce correct leading and line-height), then copied into the Phaser game world with each letter instantiated as a distinct addressable sprite.
For each page, one of a dozen transformations is applied to give the text varying physical properties, such as mass, acceleration, collision, or opacity.
On page load, the requested chapter number is rendered, the transformation is assigned, and the world is allowed to run. A Selenium wrapper script calls all 500 pages in succession, taking a screenshot at a random point in the animation:
The final book is rendered in a two-page spread PDF.
Interface started out in late 2016 as an experiment to build a perfectly pixel–fitting font at a specific small size (11px.) The idea was that by crafting a font in a particular way, with a particular coordinate system (Units Per EM), and for a particular target rasterization size (11), it would be possible to get the best of both sharpness and readability.
However after a few months of using an early version of Interface, it dawned on everyone exposed to the test that this approach had some serious real–world problems. Most notably that it was really hard to read longer text. Because of the pixel–aligning nature of that approach, the font took an almost mono–spaced appearance, making it really easy to read numbers, punctuation and very short words, but eye–straining to read anything longer.
The project was rebooted with a different approach, sticking with the specific UPM, but crafting glyphs and kerning in a way that made for more variation in the rhythm and smoother vertical and horizontal stems. As Interface was being developed, it was tested on an internal version of Figma—where the author of Interface works as a designer—and slowly improved upon based on experience and feedback.
Crytch is a web tool for creating and encrypting visual messages.
It transfers the idea of Visual Cryptography to letters and shapes consisting of multiple anchor points and connecting lines. As soon as one begins to enter a password, these points start moving on a variable matrix. That way, the password will never be stored on the server.
The correctly decrypted image is the only possible verification of a valid password. Thus, the exact point at which the original image is revealed can solely be determined by a human observer.
All text messages are displayed in a typeface specifically designed for Crytch. In order to make it impossible to deduce the encrypted letter just by counting its anchor points, all glyphs consist of the exact same amount.
Pourquoi sourit-on sur les portraits photographiques au XXe siècle, et pas au XIXe siècle? Sous cette forme élémentaire, la question est devenue une énigme prisée des études visuelles. Héritière d’une longue tradition d’analyse de l’expression des émotions, elle apparaît comme une évolution historique directement observable, documentée par des sources abondantes. Découvrir la clé de cette métamorphose paraît à portée de main.
The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence - in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be - including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books.
Since I imagine the question will present itself in some visitors’ minds (a certain amount of distrust of the virtual is inevitable) I’ll head off any doubts: any text you find in any location of the library will be in the same place in perpetuity. We do not simply generate and store books as they are requested - in fact, the storage demands would make that impossible. Every possible permutation of letters is accessible at this very moment in one of the library's books, only awaiting its discovery. We encourage those who find strange concatenations among the variations of letters to write about their discoveries in the forum, so future generations may benefit from their research.
Playscii is an open source ASCII art program, the successor to EDSCII. It runs on Windows and Linux, and will run on Mac OSX soon after a bit more work.
More info: http://vectorpoem.com/playscii/
Please note that Playscii is open source, still in early development, and is offered as a pay-what-you-want download here on itch. Testing and bug reports are appreciated!
Tausende Gangnam-Style- und Harlem-Shake-Videos auf Youtube sind der Beleg: Remix ist heute ein Massenphänomen. War das 20. Jahrhundert noch geprägt von zentralisierter Kulturproduktion, laden heute Computer, Videohandys und Internet zu kreativer und öffentlicher Interaktion mit Kulturgütern ein.
Viele der erfolgreichsten Videos auf Youtube und Facebook profitieren davon, dass andere NutzerInnen eigene Versionen von ihnen erstellen und so zur Bekanntheit des Originals beitragen. Die Bandbreite reicht dabei von verwackelten Handy-Videos bis hin zu aufwendigen Remixversionen. Sich für die Erstellung von Werken bei Vorhandenem zu bedienen, ist kein neues Phänomen. Der Blogger Malte Welding illustrierte diesen Umstand einmal unter Verweis auf Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, der Bach-Fugen bearbeitete und die den Fugen voranstehenden Präludien mit Eigenkompositionen ersetzte, die für Streicher geeignet waren: „Er remixte Bach. Er mashte ihn, er fledderte die toten Noten und schuf etwas Neues.“
Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever. I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake.
Build beautiful interactive books using GitHub/Git and Markdown.
Le papier permanent
par Astrid Brandt
La première norme internationale pour le papier permanent (ISO 9706), publiée par l’International Organization for Standardization (organisation internationale de normalisation, désignée par l’abréviation ISO) en mars 1994, fixe " les prescriptions pour qu’un papier destiné à l’établissement de documents soit permanent ", c’est-à-dire qu’il reste chimiquement et physiquement stable pendant une longue période. Cette norme internationale est l’équivalent de la norme américaine ANSI Z39.48 de 1992 : " Permanence of paper for printed library materials ".
Pour qu’un papier puisse être déclaré conforme à la norme ISO 9706 (ou ANSI Z39.48), il doit répondre aux critères suivants :
- le pH de l’extrait aqueux de la pâte à papier doit être compris entre 7,5 et 10 ;
- l’indice Kappa de la pâte à papier, qui indique la résistance à l’oxydation (liée à la présence de lignine), doit être inférieur à 5 ;
- la réserve alcaline doit être supérieure ou égale à 2 % d’équivalent de carbonate de calcium ;
- la résistance à la déchirure doit être supérieure à 350 mN pour un papier dont le grammage est supérieur à 70 g/m2.
Le symbole attaché à cette norme est le signe mathématique de l’infini dans un cercle surmontant la mention " ISO 9706 ".
Le papier permanent peut être fabriqué soit à partir de chiffons, soit à partir de pâte chimique de bois en milieu neutre ou alcalin ; le bois peut donc être utilisé à condition d’en éliminer tous les constituants non cellulosiques, et en particulier la lignine.
Homoglyphi.cc is a simple tool for writing Unicode-calligraphy. The user can combine characters from the Astral Planes of the code structure to create alternative word-images. These can, for exempel, be pasted into typographically restrictive social media. The point of view of homoglyphi.cc is the basic character set of cloud-english.
A homoglyph is a symbol that has a similar form to another symbol. The Unicode Standard is a utopian masterplan where each archetypical symbol is given its own space in an immense skeletal structure reaching for the sky. The FAQ says: “Unicode covers all the characters for all the writing systems of the world, modern and ancient.” At the time of writing, 110,182 symbols are encoded. Many of these are homoglyphs. This offers possibilities for creative users wishing to embellish their writing.
The Standard defines a true essence beyond the stylesheet. Milleniums of human cilvilization snapped to a flat grid. This universal, ultimate standard is the codebook of global text-communication. On a material level this world of symbols depends on fonts, files installed on the local machines, to become visible. If the required font is missing the reader sees a crossed out box, a question mark or nothing.
These drawings are a methodical interpretation of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schzophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
A performance between graffiti artist and town painter.
Le catalogue nos livres recense les livres électroniques du domaine public français, disponibles gratuitement et qui ont un minimum de qualité. Les sites suivant sont recensés : Bibliothèque électronique du Québec (BEQ) Bibliothèque numérique romande (BNR) Bibliothèque Russe et Slave (BRS) Ebooks Libres et Gratuits (ELG) ÉFÉLÉ Gallica La bibliothèque de Gloubik Projet Gutenberg (livres en français)
New research reveals why people like to reread books, re-watch movies and generally repeat the same experiences over and over again. It’s not addictive or ritualistic behavior, but rather a conscious effort to probe deeper layers of significance in the revisited material, while also reflecting on one's own growth through the lens of the familiar book, movie or place.