A book which is composed entirely using one entered word or concept as the starting point.
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.
Book as a Form
The Internet is an 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 look like and contain? We are not only interested in what the book contains but also in how its content is generated and presented.
How is the book generative?
Each time the program is run it produces a unique book. The book is generated using an idea/word as a seed which you enter. The following iterations generate keywords based on your entered seed word and repectively search blogs for that keyword. All the content that the program then receives is laid out as pages of the book.
Content Source
In the beginning we used the google and yahoo search API but later settled for Technorati API as it helped us get blog content which turned out to be more interesting text content to work with. We plan to further expand our data sources in the future.