The Lives of Writers

[Beyamor]

I ended up scraping bits of writers' biographies and gluing 'em together in a work of scrambled truths. The technique might not be very interesting, but some of these people sure were.

The code is here and a sample novel is here.

Potential future work might include:

• Ensuring gender consistency in paragraphs.
• Filtering out uninteresting sentences (e.g., birthdays)
• Further cleaning the data (e.g., better removal of parenthetical notes)

Though, if you've got any input, I've love to hear it.

[catseye]

If I may I make one (very) small suggestion -- in the gist of the novel sample, if you set the file type to "Markdown", it will be easier to read on github (it will wrap the text instead of making you scroll horizontally.)

It does sound like it has potential.

[jiko]

You can also view the gist raw to achieve word-wrap, but setting the file-type to Markdown would save that step.

I also think this has a lot of potential. A biography of The Author as a composite historical figure. It reminds me of The Last Novel by David Markson, which has a more auto-biographical bent but name-drops some famous artist at least every other sentence. You could also do the opposite and filter out the author names.

[Beyamor]

@catseye Good call on the markdown.

@jiko Removing the author names could be really interesting. Great idea.

[enkiv2]

If you sorted paragraphs by the first four-digit number in them (in other words, by the first thing that looks like a year) you'd probably get something that looks more or less chronological.

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Beyamor notifications@github.com wrote:

@catseye https://github.com/catseye Good call on the markdown.

@jiko https://github.com/jiko Removing the author names could be really interesting. Great idea.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo/issues/64#issuecomment-28319475 .

[catseye]

Oh yes, that would be nice. Or simply replace the four-digit numbers with an increasing sequence of numbers that look plausibly like years, so you get something like:

...moved to Montreal, where she lived until her death in 1971. In 1973, she began work on an anthology of...

Brings a new meaning to "death of the author" :)

Another idea might be, instead of always replacing the name with a pronoun, to sometimes say something like:

In 1929, Saltykov (who was now writing under the pen name Ishwar Chandra) joined the...