found text

"March Madness, 1974" is a fictionalized work in found-text form by Richard Holeton. The text splices together real and imagined events, which take place over the course of a month in March, 1974. The fictionalized story follows two students, named "R" and "U," who fall in love while studying at the Stanford overseas campus in Tours, France.

The month begins with news of Richard Nixon's indictment for his role in the Watergate scandal. The daily entries are, in part, a record of current events and cover a range of topics including: politics, crime, economics and celebrity drama. These news bites are cut together without context. However, the most recurring themes are those of death and disaster: a major airplane crash, a deepening global recession and missing and murdered college women. Despite the atmosphere of dread, as evoked by the news media, the youth remain optimistic and the final entry describes the couple venturing out into the world "full of hope."

In terms of the factulaity of the story, some of the 'news' appears to be clipped directly from the headlines. However, certain facts, like the day serial killer Ted Bundy murdered his first victim, were not publically known at the time. The narrator's special knowledge of events further blurs the divisions between "found" and "made" text. As one of the reports reads: "It can be hard to tell the real signals from the false ones" (March Madness, 1974, March 13).

"In Denial: A Further Redaction of the Mueller Report" is an "R-rated" blackout poem created from the redacted version of the Mueller report.

FBI special counsel Robert Mueller conducted a 22-month long investigation of whether President Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 Presentential elections. When the report of his findings was released to the public, significant portions were blacked out. The full report is 448 pages long. In total, approximately 7.25% of the text or 1 in 8 lines were redacted, with most of the censored text concentrated in the sections on Russian Hacking and Dumping Operations (Source: Washinton Post, Vox).

To create "In Denial," Holeton selected pages from the table of contents and the introduction and executive summary of Volume II of the report, the section which concerns obstruction of justice. About 80% of the document has been "further" blacked out. The remaining visible text describes lewd sexual acts, mostly involving Trump's rear-end. There are two versions of the poem: a 30-page version with the blacked-out sections included and a 6-page text-only version. In the latter, the censored parts are removed, so that the text appears without spaces or breaks; this version was also edited for punctuation and capitalization (Source: the Fictious Press: Select Web Publications by Richard Holeton).

This web-based computer-generated guide 'book' perpetually proposes plausible yet practically impossible walking routes through the city of Edinburgh and its environs using JavaScript developed by Caden Lovelace and images and text culled from a City of Edinburgh Transport Map published by the Edinburgh Geographical Institute in the 1940s and a pamphlet called Walks from City Bus Routes published by Edinburgh City Transport in the late 1950s.

I partially uncovered Flora's story through a well-worn stack of postcards at a dusty Midwestern estate sale in the summer of 1999. She had spent many months during the 1940s traveling alone across the United States and had consistently sent postcards back home to her mother in Peoria, Illinois. When I happened across her hand-written cards at the dissolution of her own estate, I was taken with the stories her cards revealed. I felt as though Flora and I had similar worldviews, and I easily felt a connection to her themes of freedom, loneliness, youth, death, memory and love. "Who Is Flora" is a dialog between Flora's travels and my interpretations. The story itself is presented on-line through a series of interactive screens. In addition to Flora's screens, my own screens share my reflections and thoughts, which are laid out visually to the right of Flora's stories. Graphic design, sound, motion, and text help further the sense of time and place to draw the reader more fully into the experience. Since this story is also a website it is constantly growing and changing; pieces are added as others are changed and deleted as the story grows.

(Source: Artist's description from the ELO 2002 State of the Arts Gallery)

In this dazzling exploration of contemporary human feelings, digital whiz kids Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris use their computer programs to peer into the inner lives of millions, constructing a vast and deep portrait of our collective emotional landscape. Armed with custom software that scours the English-speaking world's new Internet blog posts every minute, hunting down the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling," the authors have collected over 12 million feelings since 2005, amassing an ever-growing database of human emotion that adds more than 10,000 new feelings a day. Drawing from this massive real-world stockpile of found sentiment, We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion presents the best of the best -- the euphoria, the despair, the passion, the dreams, and the desires that make us human. At turns touching and thought-provoking, humorous and heartbreaking, We Feel Fine combines the words and pictures of total strangers to explore every corner of the human experience. Packed with personal photos, scientific observations, statistical infographics, and countless candid vignettes from ordinary people, We Feel Fine is a visual, fiercely intelligent, endlessly engrossing crash course in the secrets of human emotion. Are men or women happier? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? Is beauty the bridge between happiness and negativity? How do our emotions change as we age? What causes depression? What's sexy? What's normal? What's human? We Feel Fine finally provides a way to answer these questions that is both quantitative and anecdotal, putting individual stories into a larger context and showing the stories behind the statistics -- or as the authors like to say, "bringing life to statistics and statistics to life." With lush, colorful spreads devoted to 50 feelings, 13 cities, 10 topics, 6 holidays,5 age groups, 4 weather conditions, and 2 genders, We Feel Fine explores our emotions from every angle, providing insights into and examples of each. Equal parts pop culture and psychology, computer science and conceptual art, sociology and storytelling, We Feel Fine is no ordinary book -- with thousands of authors from all over the world sharing their uncensored emotions, it is a radical experiment in mass authorship, merging the online and offline worlds to create an indispensable handbook for anyone interested in what it's like to be human.

Amazon: "This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title"

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

Source: mission statement by the authors (wefeelfine.org)

Quiet time, dead time, free time—call it what you will, there seems to be less and less of it. What do people give up in the race to maximize every second of their waking life? What kinds of activities are replaced by the panicked drive for efficiency? No Time Machine explores these questions by mining the Internet for mentions of the phrase “I don’t have time for” and variations such as “You can’t find the time for” and “We don’t make time for.” Based on a set of procedures we’ve set up, a program analyzes the search results and reconstructs them into a poetic conversation. Interwoven with this “found poetry” generated by the program are sentences that we re-contextualized ourselves; a human-computer collaboration that expands the field of creative writing to include networked and programmable media.

(Source: authors abstract from Turbulence)