This week’s lesson showed me that right when I thought I was getting a handle on coding, something new would be thrown my way. The element of randomness created by aleatory poetry was completely unexpected- which I think is the point. Considering the care and specificity involved in creating code correctly, it was interesting to see how it could be used to create a product that gave up that control. For this week’s real life example, I sifted through the Twitter bot examples. While most of them were simple repetition of different text symbols, the soft landscapes and the Happnin’ in Hastings were by far my favorite because of their creativity. With the color shifts and various designs, the landscape bot showcased that aleatory text isn’t limited to symbols. I’d be interested in learning what other aspects of visual media can produce. The Happnin’ in Hastings account also provided a new perspective on just how random the bots can be. Creating whole sentences like that must require an extensive Tracery grammar. All of the accounts showcase a wide variety of uses for Tracery, and I wonder if a similar method could be applied to other social media apps (although it probably already has been). I also have a sneaking suspicion that the Albritton Bell Tower Twitter account may be one of these bots to mimic the hourly ringing of the bell on campus.
This lesson also connects back to the Hyperlink narrative text examples from last week, as I noticed that A Tale of Crowns used a sort of aleatory poetry to refer to the reader or character in different ways each time. Using a combination of the Hyperlink Twine technique and Aleatory poetry would give longer narrative stories like that more flexibility. The author of A Tale of Crowns is also continuously updating the story, so adding in grammar changes would entice individuals that have already read through the existing story to go through it several times. This also generates more website traffic for the creator.
I did struggle with implementing my own Tracery grammar into my fable A Ghost and a Zombie. I found that the “Generate Again” button would appear, but not my text. However, when I tried to correct this issue, the button would disappear, but my text would show up on the page. I’m struggling with finding the correct place to put the Tracery HTML page so that the grammar will run on the story. I left the post to showcase the text so that it shows an attempt was made, but I still have to work with it to get Tracery to run correctly. I’ll most likely take a look at my classmates’ pages to see how they were able to make it work. It seems I run into the problem of program or code placement with most of the lessons I wonder how that can be mitigated going forward. It may be something fundamental that I missed in the lesson earlier this semester, so perhaps going over those will give me some hints as to how to fix my Tracery grammar problem.
Posted In: Reflections