Note: this is a work-in-progress and requires some cleaning up, but is still fun to play around with.
Roland Barthes was a writer and academic who studied the science of signs, known as semiotics. Barthes considered fashions to have an underlying structure with elements arranged according to rules. Categories of elements can be substituted while still existing in the same relation to each other. New elements and arrangements deemed "fashionable" are arbitrary dictates (from industry):
Blue is in now
On this simple webpage a context-free grammar is used to algorithmically generate such arbitrary pronouncements. Grammars of fashion with substitutable elements and paradigm phrases are used to generate What's New across a variety of domains. Currently, grammars are depicted for fashion, philosophy and food.
- Draft grammars for clothes, food, philosophy and games
- Publish interactive version of grammars
- Replace "placeholder" with an actual prompt
- Use modifiers to clean up some outputs (capitals, a/n)
- Expand vocabulary and sentence structures significantly
- Investigate generation of images/sound
- Use minified version of tracery.js
- Add credits, links and licences
- Improve description of Barthes' thought in readme and about