SpringerLink: A Novel?

[jimkinsey]

Last minute entry produced on one of our fortnightly Springer IT hack days!

Inspired by Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? , produce a novel entirely from questions pulled from content on the Springer Link web-site, http://link.springer.com.

Produced using CoffeeScript in Literate mode for obvious reasons.

https://github.com/jimkinsey/nanogenmo

Still have to produce a full 50K word novel (first attempt failed due to stack overflow of non-tail-recursive function, but this shouldn't be hard to fix). Here's an excerpt from a 2K word early draft:

Chapter 1

In what sense is this a novel situation? Should conflicts in the private domain be exempted from public scrutiny in cases where individual are being deprived of their basic legal rights? How many students study abroad and where do they go? Furthermore if the existing policies are found to be ineffective, what all policy measures can be suggested to the Government to put an end to this evil practice? Who are user entrepreneurs?

[MichaelPaulukonis]

I think I like this?

[ikarth]

Definitely gives purpose to all of those abstracts that are peppered with questions?

[jimkinsey]

Better late than never, here's a final draft:

https://github.com/jimkinsey/nanogenmo/blob/master/springer-link-a-novel.pdf

I like how a theme emerged about artificial intelligence and criminal liability. Feels like there's something on the author's mind!

Even once I'd fixed my stack overflow I found loads of questions which just needed cleaning out for readability, and there's still stuff in there which doesn't quite work, especially around quotes and brackets, which would require more sophisticated parsing.

Some of what I had to clear out were LaTeX equations, which it would have been fun to be able to leave in. Next time!