Generative Books by CMU Students

[golanlevin]

Generative Books by CMU Students

For #NaNoGenMo 2016 (National Novel Generation Month), and in the spirit of #PROCJAM, the 23 students in Golan Levin's course "Introduction to Interactivity and Computation" at CMU spent two weeks creating generative books. For this assignment, students were given the prompt to:

Write a program (or more likely: a set of programs) which generates a book. Your program(s) should generate the content of the book, as well as execute its layout, automatically. Your book should have at least 20 pages, and must be printed and bound.

Students were encouraged to develop books that had any combination of generative text and/or generative illustrations. In support of this, the students were presented with optional programming tools including Basil.js (a library which permits Adobe InDesign to be scripted computationally); RiTa, a Processing/Javascript extension which offers many common tools for analyzing and synthesizing text; and the Temboo.com API, which provides easy access to many common data services. Students were permitted to use their choice of programming language; most used JavaScript, Processing, and/or Python. The majority of the students were sophomores in the CMU School of Art and School of Design.

The learning objectives of this assignment were to prompt students to develop:

• Further understanding of generative principles: generating text, images, layouts, and their comprehensive combination in a complex yet familiar physical object, a book.
• Experience combining multiple self-written programs into a multi-stage workflow.
• Exposure to a scripting language (Basil.js) for controlling a powerful commercial software application (Adobe InDesign) that would ordinarily be used ‘by hand’.
• Exposure to a toolkit (RiTa) for language analysis and synthesis, and text analysis/synthesis concepts such as Markov chains and POS (parts-of-speech) taggers.
• Awareness of generative text strategies, in the context of artists’ books.

A complete index to all of the students' books can be found here. At the conclusion of the assignment, the students' books received written reviews from three external evaluators: MIT professor of digital literature, Nick Montfort; CMU professor of computational design, Kyuha (Q) Shim; and Katie Rose Pipkin, an artist/curator and MFA student in the CMU School of Art. More details about the assignment can be found here.

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Reviewers' Picks

Fauna of Sloogia by Lingdong Huang

Inspired by the book Classic of Mountains and Seas from 4th century BC China, this book is a bestiary of procedurally-generated illustrations of imaginary creatures. Every generated book is different, detailing different creatures from different islands. Each creature is titled “Fauna of ”, and has a map of that island and illustrations of 50 creatures living on that island, along with their (Latin-like) names.

• Additional information and documentation
• PDF example copy (18MB)
• Print-on-demand at Blurb.com
• Processing (Java) code

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so sorry by Claire Hentschker

Claire writes:

The book ‘so sorry’ compiles all of the emails I sent from 2011-2016 in which the word ‘sorry’ appears at least once, in reverse chronological order. There were 214 emails that met this criterion, from two different Gmail accounts of mine. Each page of this book contains a redacted version of one of these emails, in which only the sentence that contains the apology is left visible, without its context. Each page also includes the time and date each email was sent. After I included an email in the book, I permanently deleted it from my email account.

• Additional information and documentation
• Basil.js and p5.js code
• PDF copy (336 KB)

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Genesong by Jacqueline Fashimpaur

Jacqui, a first-year undergraduate, decided to make a song book. Entitled “Genesong”, each generated imprint contains 30 songs, each with rhyming lyrics, musical notes, and guitar chords. The songs are structured to have a verse and chorus, a rhyme scheme (“ABAB”, “AAAA”, or “AABB"), melodies generated to fit one of several common chord progressions, and lyrics generated via RiTa’s random word generator.

• Additional information, documentation, and example prints
• PDF example copy (8MB)
• Processing (Java) code

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More books produced for this assignment

Many whimsical, provocative and lovely books were produced for this assignment. Some are intensely personal, such as Year One by Hizal Celik, Summer 2014 by Cameron Burgess, and Alicia Iott's What I was doing when you texted me. Other projects mine social media in various ways, such as #RIP by Xavier Apostol, Attempts at Jokes by Tatyana Mustakos, and Ideally We Meeta Few Times xa Week and Have Bottle Rocket Sex by Katie Tender. Other works explore new perspectives on literature, such as By any other name by Kaleb Crawford, or Words to Live By by Kelli Clark. Below is an index to the projects produced by Prof. Levin's class.

• What I was doing when you texted me by Alicia Iott
• Spirit Animals by Anna Henson
• OKAY BABE by Angee Attar
• Emotional Shakes by Ari Daly
• Summer 2014 by Cameron Burgess
• MythMash by Catherine Luo
• Stripes by Darcy Cao
• Stream by Andrew Chang
• Alphabet Fonts by Adella Guo
• Year One by Hizal Celik
• Poetry for Robots by Robots by Kate Chaudoin
• Ideally We Meeta Few Times xa Week and Have Bottle Rocket Sex by Katie Tender
• [Eng Sub] by HorribleSubs (but actually though…) by Kearnie Lin
• Words to Live By by Kelli Clark
• By any other name by Kaleb Crawford
• The Book of Kindness by Marisa Lu
• Attempts at Jokes by Tatyana Mustakos
• Gaslighting Trackr by Tina Goparaju
• #RIP by Xavier Apostol
• The Faces of Teenie Harris by Zaria Howard

[binaricorn]

This is so cool!

[lizadaly]

Fantastic! Congrats to the participants!

[enkiv2]

This is wonderful, and I really like the idea of bringing students into this.

…

On Thu, Dec 1, 2016 at 9:21 AM Liza Daly ***@***.***> wrote: Fantastic! Congrats to the participants! — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#148 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAd6GaYDzyWJ0iB3xkuonwKnz7v35Xvuks5rDtfSgaJpZM4LA9Df> .