generative-literature

A list of resources to create your own generative literature.

This repo is for beginners. It collects all resources needed to get data, feed it to a recurrent neural network, and get your own personal generative literature work. The examples are made getting data from Twitter feeds. You can use any text based data you like.

What do you need

This tutorial is made for MacOS users

You will need:
· A Twitter account (optional)
· A 2.7 python enviroment installed – the tutorial might not work with higher python versions
· Tweepy installed (we'll cover that)
· Torch and lua installed (covered in one of the links)
· Some time: training data can take anything between hours (1-3 MB) and days depending on the size of your dataset

1. Set up your twitter app

Follow the instructions you find here http://docs.inboundnow.com/guide/create-twitter-application/
Important: Make a note of your OAuth settings:
· Consumer Key
· Consumer Secret
· OAuth Access Token
· OAuth Access Token Secret
You will need them in order to download the tweets from Twitter feeds.

2. Download and install Tweepy

Super easy. Just follow the instructions here https://github.com/tweepy/tweepy

3. Create a python script to download the tweets you want to get

Go to: https://gist.github.com/yanofsky/5436496
Copy the code and paste it in a code editor (like Sublime text).
You only need to change:
· the Twitter API credentials You have them from point 1 of this tutorial
· the Twitter handle you want to get tweets from: in the example from @yanofsky you have J_tsar. Choose the one you want to get tweets from.

4. Run the script

Save your file as tweet_dumper.py
Go on your Terminal and cd your way to the folder where you have saved tweet_dumper.py
Now run the script by typing python tweet_dumper.py in your terminal
Twitter only allows to get the last 3200 tweets from an account. They will be saved in a csv file.

5. Clean the data

The csv file comes with a bunch of stuff other than the text of the tweets. Get the tweets and copy and paste them in a input.txt file

6. Install the recurrent neural network, train it, and sample it

A bit more complicated than point 2, but still farily easy. Go to: https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn and follow the instructions.

7. Extra tip for selecting the right .t7 file for sampling

This is actully the only piece of code I wrote myself, with the help of StackOverflow.

import os
import re

paths = (os.path.join(root, filename)
        for root, _, filenames in os.walk('/Users/your-user/some-folder/char-rnn-master/cv/')
        for filename in filenames)
			

for path in paths:
    newname = re.sub(r'.*_', '', path)
    if newname != path:
        os.rename(path, newname)

If you don't have the python module re installed, go to your terminal and install it. As simple as typing pip install re in the terminal
This will eliminate all the part before the char _ from your trained models (the .t7 files). That way it's gonna be super simple to identify the one with least loss (the smaller the number, the smaller the loss).
Then keep with the instructions from point 6 and have fun sampling.
Cheers!