Multi-Headed · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Apr 23, 11:19
Multi Headed Hydra Proto ~ a generative book
The idea that an autobiography can not only be of a person but also of data, ideas, concepts or other inanimate objects is of interest to us. We are interested in looking at how certain ideas have prevailed on the web over the years. Ideas of emotion, conflict, markets, networks and humor to name a few. The generative book is a narrative object that elicits such ideas/concepts/identities that have existed on the web for years and that which continue to be produced or appended to by people in present day cyberspace.
Why the form of a book?
The Internet is a fascinating source for content. Even more so since content today is generated by millions of people from certain parts of the world. Though the Internet and form it has taken is very different from that of a book- We are interested in re looking at one of the oldest methods of storing knowledge in the light of hypertext, networks, content syndication, concept databases such as WordNet and user generated content. In such a scenario what would a book such as this look like and contain? We are not only interested in what the book contains but also in how its content is generated and presented. For example the page of contents or narration is something we would like to revisit in a book like this.
What is generative about the book?
Every time the program is run it produces a unique book. No one book produced by this program is the same. It renders layouts, spreads, colours, type and other graphic elements depending on a set of relationships built from the queried data. The book is generated using an Idea as a seed.
What is this queried data?
The queried data would come from sites and search engines such as yahoo, flickr, craigslist, twitter, slashdot, wikipedia, open social networks, blogs, archives or the wayback machine to name a few. This would mean using open APIs and RSS feeds and some scraping wherever required.
Example:
The seed idea being “Love”
The program would start with concept search on LOVE using wordnet. It would query for hypernyms, hyponyms and synsets of the word LOVE. This is the phase where the program will expand the keyword by looking at its synonyms, antonyms and related words. This is essentially where we would like to create a context for querying information regarding the seed idea (in this case LOVE). Using the returned wordnet results the program would then query other sites using all its synonyms, antonyms, similar concepts.
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