code, github, language

Open Wound v1

https://github.com/mbutler/openwound

Openwound is a (re)writing tool named after the famous William S. Burroughs quote about cut-up writing being divination. “When you cut into the present the future leaks out.”

This project started in 2002 with the publication of the book Alloy: Kind Tricks and Bodily Realities in the Vanguard Party that I created for my MFA in Intermedia Art from the University of Iowa. Read more. I originally used a DOS program called Babble, before writing a parts-of-speech based program in Perl in 2005. After an aborted PHP version in 2009, I wrote this word vectors + parts-of-speech based version for node.js in 2016.

I. When a TAG button is pressed

  1. Accept any amount of text from a field called INPUT. Perform a part-of-speech tagging and display the tagged words in a text field called TAGGED OUTPUT. The value of the TAGGED OUTPUT field might look/NN something/NN like/IN this/DET ./PP
  2. Copy each word (without its POS tag) into an appropriate field based on it.s part-of-speech. The user may delete words or add their own words. Make all words lowercase.

II. When a GENERATE button is pressed

  1. Accept a value the user has inputed in the COMMON field. The value can be from 0-100. The number corresponds to an array that contains the 1000 most common words in the English language. (For example, a value of 20 in the COMMON text field means the 20 most common words will not be substituted in the next step.)
  2. Substitute each of the words or punctuation marks in the TAGGED OUTPUT field with a different word or punctuation mark from the corresponding POS field unless that word is in the range specified by the COMMON value in which case it is not substituted. Display the result in a SUBSTITUTION text field.
  3. Capitalize any letter directly following the PP, Punctuation, Sentence Ender tag then remove the POS tags from the SUBSTITUTION text. Display the new text in a field called RECOMBINED.