aisyalam

I was able to finish a draft of the “What is Digital Poetry?” lecture scheduled for next Friday, and have also scripted much of the multimedia projection (although a few open segments still remain). I spent some time reviewing the generated text sites listed in the ELO Directory, and found some enjoyable sites, like a haiku generator (http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/haikugen/framset1.htm), an automatic poetry generator (whose mechanics I couldn’t figure out) at http://www.mindspring.com/~mwharton/automatic/, as well as a couple of other sites I much appreciated, like a Flash piece called tema (http://telepoesis.net/tema/tema.swf) and Komninos Zervos’ “Beer” (published at Beehive, http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/43arc.html). I’ll spend the next week+ refining the presentation, which appears to be shaping up nicely. One discovery, possibly a minor setback, is that Hypercard player will not run on the Mac OS X, which—if I can’t get a classic system loaded onto the G4 before next week—will rule out works by Cayley, Rosenberg, Balpe, and others, which would be unfortunate.

At the offhanded advice of one of my colleagues here, who is aware that I’d like to start building voice-activated hypertexts, I started to take a look at Microsoft Agent today. The real upshot of this was getting involved with all of the requisite voice recognition software, which I also downloaded and began to experiment with:

I always knew that I’d end of the talking to the computer and now I am. So, now I can dictate my blood intrusive I want to which I started doing at the beginning of this paragraph. Well you can see that it’s not a perfect science but it looks like I will have some fun with it anyway. It is also intriguing, and opens up certain possibilities, to have the computer read homes and paragraphs.

OK, time to go back to typing mode when poems=homes (even though that mistake is actually an alright sentiment). We’ll see where this experiment leads. One thing I’m trying to figure out is why the text-reader isn’t capable of reading more than about a paragraph at a time.

Otherwise, lecture #3 tomorrow morning. Looking at Flickr (again)today (as it is one of the sites I’ll be discussing tomorrow) turned out to be not only aesthetically pleasing (looking at pictures by wakest, images tagged with Putrajaya and Cyberjaya, and “interesting” images posted in the past week) but was motivational. I’ve gotten lucky and taken a captured a few good images in the past month, but I’d really like to start making a higher ratio of artful shots. Yet another thing to begin concentrating on!