2d:null 2e:["$","title",null,{"children":"Assignment 7: Art & Probability I | KarlieDoesNotExist | Observable"}] 33:Ta0c,md` ## READ ### VirtualMuse I use to feel a bit unsure about the randomness in the machine-generated poems, because I believe poems are the product of some human emotions and cannot be imitated by a machine. But the process of *Travesty* making a satisfactory poem kind of makes me realise that using the machine to generate text/poem is a collaboration between human (the artist and the viewer) and the programme. We can see how struggling and difficult it is to make *Travesty* generate an interesting and surprising poem, not a cliche, not too random, seemingly rational and reasonable. While the generating procedure is done by the programme, the programming and selection of the final work are done by the artist. "The output is nonsense anyway; why not just leave it alone" is hence a question corresponding to this and raised by the artist. And through the reading I feel that all of the criteria of the machine-generated poems are still based on human's reading habits, that is, we evaluate the machine-generated poetry in the same way we evaluate human poetry. We modify the programme accordingly and select the output pieces carefully. Therefore, the computer's job seems to be increasing the possibilities of the poem, while the fundamental structure is "defined" by the artist (creator). (I wonder if there will be a "Harold Cohen's way" of digital poetry writing. That seems more interesting and convincing.) Some other thoughts when reading the article: - Layout: how can the layout change the meaning of the content? How can it be easy for the audience to read AND disturbing at the same time? - Accuracy and possibility: does they against each other? Which one are we pursuing, accuracy or possibility, when doing digital writing? #### So You Want to Build a Generator, by Kate Compton - What are you making? - A generated poem, either based on some other texts or my own thoughts. - Constraints: meaningful, with words in certain books, flexible and dynamic, changes over time (short-term and long-term), descriptive and reflective. - What makes a “bad” example of this artefact? - Not surprising, too ambiguous to understand, bad at grammar/phrasing - How to imitate a human's method of making it? - Good question...

Analyse the original text. (Distanced reading or stuff)
Think about an overall rule and to make the new poem.
Create variability in structure. How to pick the options? (Distribution of words, structure, Parametric method...)
Self-evaluation: Did "I" meet the constraints?
Generate again.

`34:T646,md`
#### Art and the API - I started to have a clear mind of how API can help artists making their artworks. With the APIs, the artists (or other creators) can access the data they originally cannot access, or realise some functionalities that are originally difficult to realise. - The concept of "Internet art" and "art of not being material entities" is very inspiring to me: most Internet artworks never exist physically, but got widely spread out through the net. This made me think about what the Internet brought, as a medium, to those pieces of work on the Internet; - API as the bridge (that connects the data/software owner, the artist, and the audience?) #### How to write poems with a computer? - Algorithmic and random (anti-algorithmic): why algorithm? why random? - "If it does, then poems may remain, as they are now, one last refuge for human beings, for their communications (not to be confused with what the schools call " communication science"), for the strange, non-random phenomenon that we call love." The author mentioned a comparison between computer-generated poems and a poem written by his girl. He says: "(the poem by his daughter) gets its major effect because it is a communication from a particular human being." So yeah, I feel that most programmers are discouraged to work on digital poetry because of the amount of work it requires, as well as the "unnecessity" of computer generating poem. However what I learnt from modern poetry is that, what matters is not whether the author puts emotion into the poem, but how the poem itself evokes the reader's emotion. `35:[{"id":"3e86c000bdab56c24f77f8ccffe53bc8cfa1acd8f78186d2954acc6d5afad2d4c4c920a23ae99ce4837bd4e0d8e6141848360003426dc6262ff6b19595b4fe04","href":"https://static.observableusercontent.com/files/3e86c000bdab56c24f77f8ccffe53bc8cfa1acd8f78186d2954acc6d5afad2d4c4c920a23ae99ce4837bd4e0d8e6141848360003426dc6262ff6b19595b4fe04","name":"heckerNews.png","type":"image/png","lastModified":1615292171524.498,"size":13909}] 31:{"id":"2b8ce917cb240b49","slug":"assignment-7-art-probability-i","title":"Assignment 7: Art & Probability I","thumbnail":"cc353bab9262a492429d00233beb96078d95f6a6a3c5cc35ab1c53a58815809e","access_level":"public","create_time":"$D2021-03-07T09:44:11.629Z","update_time":"$D2021-03-11T03:10:11.589Z","view_time":null,"first_public_time":"$D2021-03-11T03:10:56.850Z","has_unpublished_edits":null,"fork":false,"stars":1,"starred":false,"owner":{"type":"team","id":"b34c988451399e98","login":"wenrazhao2","name":"KarlieDoesNotExist","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/64edd542e55cff350a7503e5050267fb1768e8cc5052184b8a8cb49162d172f3","tier":"starter_2024"},"version":387,"publish_version":387,"role":null,"authored":false,"authors":[{"type":"individual","id":"302ba7635bb9b25d","login":"wenrazhao2","name":"KarlieDoesNotExist","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/64edd542e55cff350a7503e5050267fb1768e8cc5052184b8a8cb49162d172f3","tier":null}],"members":[{"type":"individual","id":"302ba7635bb9b25d","login":"wenrazhao2","name":"KarlieDoesNotExist","avatar_url":"https://avatars-next.observableusercontent.com/64edd542e55cff350a7503e5050267fb1768e8cc5052184b8a8cb49162d172f3","tier":null,"role":"editor"}],"comments":[],"custom_thumbnail":false,"trashed":false,"lapsed":null,"subscribed":null,"forks":0,"collection":null,"type":"notebook","body":{"title":"Assignment 7: Art & Probability I","cells":[{"id":0,"value":"md`# Assignment 7: Art & Probability I

\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":5,"value":"$33","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":41,"value":"$34","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":17,"value":"md`\n
\n## LOCATE\n\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":125,"value":"md`\nThe [Hacker News API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API/blob/master/README.md) provides trending data (and other stuff) on [Hacker News

](https://news.ycombinator.com/) in nearly real time.\n\nA data visualization project made with the data it provides: [Hacker News Front Page Trends](https://toddwschneider.com/dashboards/hacker-news-trends/?q=Uber%2C+Lyft&f=title&s=text&m=frac_items&t=year)\n

\nThe below URL provides the IDs of the top stories on Hacker News.\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":235,"value":"url = \"https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json\"","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":50,"value":"topStoryId = (await fetch(url)).json()","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":249,"value":"md`\nWith a list of the Ids, we can fetch data about the top N stories from a series of URLs like this: \n~~~JS\nhttps://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/ID.json\n~~~\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":255,"value":"async function fetchTopStories() {\n let stories = {};\n for (var i = 0; i < 20; i++) {\n let storyId = topStoryId[i];\n let storyDetailsURL = `https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/${storyId}.json`;\n let response = await fetch(storyDetailsURL);\n stories[storyId] = await response.json();\n }\n\n return stories;\n}","pinned":true,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":358,"value":"md`\nAnd we can get the data like this:\n\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":193,"value":"top20Stories = fetchTopStories()","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":355,"value":"md`\nWe can, of course, extract some of the information from the raw data, and make a real-time top stories list as shown below.\n

\nBut other than that, since the api also returns the posted time of the stories, I think it's possible to track how long an article stays on the \"top stories list\". So that we can see how the trend of the top stories changes over time.\n\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":212,"value":"titles = Object.values(top20Stories).map(\n item => \"\" + item.title + \" by \" + item.by\n)","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":260,"value":"{\n let content = html`

${display}

`;\n return content;\n}","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":68,"value":"md`-----------------------\n## Some other stupid but fun APIs\n
\n[An API of Ice And Fire](https://anapioficeandfire.com/): All the data from the universe of Ice And Fire.
\n[Swapi, the Star Wars API](https://swapi.dev/documentation#schema)
\n[Fun Translations](https://funtranslations.com/api/?ref=apilist.fun)
\n[FriendlyRobot API](http://api.friendlyrobot.fr/v1/) returns nicknames of the input English name.\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":20,"value":"md`\n
\n## CREATE\n\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":137,"value":"md`\nIn our last class we discussed about how should the content change over time. I had some ideas about this, so I focused on improving this part, but the [outcome](https://observablehq.com/@wenrazhao2/digital-writing-version-2) doesn't seem satisfying at all...\n\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":275,"value":"md`-----------------------\n## Appendix\n`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":281,"value":"function displayTitles() {\n let display = \"\";\n for (let line of titles) {\n display += line + \"
\";\n }\n return display;\n}","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"},{"id":284,"value":"display = displayTitles()","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs","author":"$undefined","summary":"$undefined","output":"$undefined","database":"$undefined"}],"files":"$W35","stdlib":"1","titling":"auto"}} 32:"$31:body"