dx9240
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3 years ago Open dx9240 opened 3 years ago
dx9240
commented
1 week ago I recorded about an hour of audio of me reading the generated novel doing my best impression of an old crusty 19th scholar - how I imagine Charles Darwin and co. There seems to be this interesting effect that no matter how hard you try to pay attention, it seems impossible to recall what you heard. I also printed a hardback print book copy of the generated next. As seen in the photo, it was presented along with the 'audio book' at the Winchester School of Art Gallery Post-Doctoral Research student show in 2023.
Introduction
We wanted to work collaboratively as a group to generate a mash-up style novel around the theme 'being human'. Each of the 8 authors selected one or more texts from Project Gutenberg which they personally felt conveyed some aspect of what it means to be human. The selections themselves fall into 3 general themes, although they do overlap: human behavior and experience, the supernatural, and the animal. The selected texts were used as input to generate several novel versions. The authors reviewed, discussed, and finally voted on the version which was chosen as the NaNoGenMo 2020 submission.
The code is written in Python and uses Markovify to generate the output text.
The final novel appears to contain a regular occurrence of animal terms throughout the text.
Human Behavior and Experience
As one of the first modern novels in the Western world, Cervantes' Don Quixote was chosen chiefly because it is a pleasure to read and incredibly influential. It also shows the complexity of human behavior both with its strength, its fragility, and indeterminacy; we never know whether the protagonist is mad or sane, or what is invented or dreamed.
Kafka's The Metamorphosis was selected because it's both about giving up being human and learning to be human in a different form. It also mirrors a state of modernity where public time conflicts with private time, and a general disconnection with the world.
Dostoyevsky's "An Honest Thief" shows the very human state of being guilty and innocent at the same time. It was selected especially because of the strong impression made by one of the passages: "When a man is guilty, you know, sir, he scents trouble far off, like the birds of the air before a storm".
Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was chosen because it shows A range of human experiences and situations. The tales have been able to take on drastically different readings over time.
The Supernatural
Hearn's Kwaidan is a collection of weird and ghostly tales from old Japanese books and from China. They're often told as spooky campfire stories to entertain, to connect people, and to make sense of the supernatural. The translated tales also work to connect Western readers to Japan.
Volume II of Poe's The Works of Edgar Allan Poe was selected in large part because it contains the short story "The Tell Tale Heart''. This classic work of Gothic fiction resonates with human subjectivity, and it's supernatural theme reaches beyond the human.
In Chapter 5 of Shelley's Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus, doctor Frankenstein succeeds in bringing his experiment to life. This text sample was chosen because not only is the story about being human, but Frankenstein's monster themselves is very literally a mash-up.
The Animal
A selection of the tales which feature animal protagonists in Grimm's Fairy Tales was made in order to highlight our connection to and our relationship with animals. This selection also critically questions why animals need to be anthropomorphized.
Volume I of Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication is chosen as an example of how human evolution and development has squeezed animals and plants together. It also represents a (dis)connection between humans and nature.
Tweaks and Edits
The first few generated texts featured a large amount of Middle English. While the archaic language in The Canterbury Tales brought a clear and interesting variation in language in the generated text, the authors ultimately decided to remove The Tales from the training data to make the output more readable by using only Modern English texts. Here is an example of output with Middle English.
Variations of Animals and Plants was the longest input text, and as such its presence dominated the output more than intended. To solve this, its input text was reduced by about half and the Markovify model was retrained.
The final version of the generated novel was chosen by authors' vote, and the title was selected as a group by picking out interesting names and phrases from the selected version. For example:
'The Apollo, too, is not invariable; for I beheld them then. As regards vegetation, as well as the voice of her own. This epoch—these later years—took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the Dragon-King' (p. 1).
Quotes
The animal theme seems to have made its way from the input texts and into the output to feature quite prominently:
'Dragons; Persian Carriers.--The English Dragon differs from the terrible night together.” The cat, I remembered, in a publichouse' (p. 104).
‘But latterly there has been objected that our boat was the richest person in England associated with extinct mammals, so that in France of a single, broad and thick plank of the stranger—let me call him by these low people, who, however, had no claim. “Who dares?” he demanded hoarsely of the wild boar is as to what I might say, for I had to do more than that which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.” ’ (p. 46).
‘...Mr. Blyth has been said that all organic beings, without exception, tend to become giddy and tumble to the Carrier than to destroy the authority of the feet and beg for pardon and say that “divested of corporate investiture man were God.”’ (p. 30).