words

The poem has been presented in libraries.

Seedlings_ is a digital media installation that plants words as seeds and lets them grow using the Datamuse API, a data-driven word-finding engine. It is at once an ambient piece in which words and concepts are dislocated and recontextualized constantly, and a playground for the user to create linguistic immigrants and textual nomads. In Seedlings_, a word can be transplanted into a new context, following pre-coded generative rules that are bundled under the names of plants (ginkgo, dandelion, pine, bamboo, ivy…). These generative rules consist of a series of word-finding queries to the Datamuse API such as: words with a similar meaning, adjectives that are used to describe a noun, words that start and end with specific letters. They are then grouped in modules to represent the visual structure of the corresponding plant and can be constrained with a theme word. A new plant can be grafted on top of the previous plant by switching to a new starting point from the latest generative result. Other than words in monospace font, lines of dashes are the only other visual element in the piece, expressing the minimalist aesthetics in these potentially infinite twodimensional linguistic beings. In distributional semantics, words that are used and occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings. Based on this hypothesis, words are processed by n-grams, represented and manipulated as vectors in contemporary Machine Learning. With the help of algorithms, we can now identify kinships between words (through similarity or frequent consecutive use) in milliseconds. Seedlings_ reconfigures existing technologies and services in Natural Language Processing as the virtual soil to generate alternative linguistic plants: it seeks new poetic combination of words by encouraging unusual flow of words and concepts.

Extraordinay Facts Relating To the Vision of Colours was once the title of the very first scientific publication about colourblindness. The text in this interactive animation claims all kinds of things about colours, while the colours themselves disclose different things. Not only the course of the text is decided by the user, but also what is and is not seen.

text and idea: Hans Kloos
technical execution: Olivier Otten

(translation description Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

A potential polyphony is an interactive text compilation which results in an ever-changing polyphone word-image composition. The visitor can, at its discretion, turn on, play, and turn off the six sequences that make up the work. This video is part of the project Zelf worden See www.zelfworden.nl. (translation description Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

The poem tells about a person who wants to leave someone and because of that spews a tirade of made-up curse words. I have translated this by making the words surround the text "I accuse you": when you read the poem you feel as if too many things are thrown at you resulting in an unclear situation.

The game has 2 ends:
The last line of the poem by Ad Poppelaars
A poem written by Vera in which all bad words are taken back and you are praised instead.

(translation description Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

Stupid Robot looks at everything but understands nothing. Can you help? Teach it as much as you can about the image. As it learns, it’ll want to know longer and longer words!
Stupid Robot is a quick and easy browser game that asks players to describe an image they are shown with particular lengths of words. The more word slots they fill, the smarter the robot gets.
Stupid Robot shows players images from libraries’ digital collections, and simply by playing players contribute data to these libraries and make the images they “tag” more accessible to the world.

Libraries and museums across the world have millions digital media artifacts, such as audio, video, and images that have no tags. Without tags (also known as metadata) describing their content, these artifacts are unsearchable and virtually unusable. Unfortunately, metadata is time consuming and expensive to generate, and many institutions can’t afford to tag their collections. Stupid Robot is part of the Metadata Games project, a free and open source suite of crowdsourcing games built to collect metadata with the public’s help. Playing Stupid Robot sends tags back to the institutions from which the images are drawn, allowing them to be more accessible to everyone: to the institutions, to researchers, and to the public. Play Stupid Robot, save digital media artifacts from oblivion.

(Source: http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/stupid-robot/)

Do you have a green thumb? Test your skills as the victor of vines by typing the words shown on the screen, and grow your beanstalk from a tiny tendril to massive cloudscraper in this calming, zen-like typing game. Beanstalk is a quick and easy browser game that asks players to type the word they are shown on the screen. By presenting players with words from books of libraries’ scanned digital collections, Beanstalk collects transcriptions that are sent back to the libraries that the words come from. The more words players type correctly, the faster the beanstalk grows, and the more contributions are made to libraries’ and museums’ collections. Get to the top of the “High Score” leaderboard by correctly transcribing the most words, and declare yourself the victor of vines! Beanstalk tackles a major challenge for digital libraries: full-text searching of digitized material is significantly hampered by poor output from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. When first scanned, the pages of digitized books and journals are merely image files, making the pages unsearchable and virtually unusable. While OCR converts page images to searchable, machine encoded text, historic literature is difficult for OCR to accurately render because of its tendency to have varying fonts, typesetting, and layouts. Beanstalk presents players with phrases from scanned pages from cultural heritage institutions. After much verification, the words players type are sent to the libraries that store the corresponding pages, allowing those pages to be searched and data mined and ultimately making historic literature more usable for institutions, scholars, educators, and the public. Play Beanstalk, save scanned books from digital oblivion. (Source: http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/beanstalk/)

You’re the head coach of the Eugene Melonballers, an up-and-coming team in the International Smorball Federation. Can you coach your team to victory, helping them win the coveted Dalahäst Trophy and bring glory home to Eugene?
Smorball is a challenging browser game that asks players to correctly type the words they see on the screen–punctuation and all. The more words they type correctly, the quicker opposing teams are defeated, and the closer the Eugene Melonballers get to the Dalahäst Trophy.

Smorball tackles a major challenge for digital libraries: full-text searching of digitized material is significantly hampered by poor output from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. When first scanned, the pages of digitized books and journals are merely image files, making the pages unsearchable and virtually unusable. While OCR converts page images to searchable, machine encoded text, historic literature is difficult for OCR to accurately render because of its tendency to have varying fonts, typesetting, and layouts.
Smorball presents players with phrases from scanned pages from cultural heritage institutions. After much verification, the words players type are sent to the libraries that store the corresponding pages, allowing those pages to be searched and data mined and ultimately making historic literature more usable for institutions, scholars, educators, and the public.
Play Smorball, save scanned books from digital oblivion.

(Source: http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/smorball/)