Ruby

The Way Bot scrapes Twitter for tweets that contain the phrase “I like it when.” After removing all the hashtags, special characters, and identifying material, the bot confirms that it has not encountered the expression before and then stores the statement in a database in order to tweet a fresh comment every few minutes. By removing specific markers of identity and filtering hateful or offensive language, what comes through is a more basic (and generally positive) expression of human feeling. The generative engine for The Way Bot was originally created to harvest a large amount of sentences starting with “the way that” and assemble them into the 99-page novel, The Way That I’m Crying so Hard I Have to Gasp For Air, by Eli Brody and 5,134 friends, a work submitted to NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) in 2013. Whereas reading the litany of statements out loud emphasizes The Way Bot's anaphoric poetics, embedding this account within a user's Twitter stream produces a lyrical refrain, a musical chorus that endlessly transmits a beacon of humanity’s collective unconscious. (Source: Editorial Statement from the works collection site)

## READ WRITE GARDEN ## is an erasure poem by J. R. Carpenter carved out of Ruby code and code comments by Caden Lovelace. This text was created for The Ill-Tempered Rubyist, an international anthology of poems involving computer languages, especially the RUBY language, hand-made and edited by Karen Randall in honor of the Millay Colony‘s ruby anniversary.

Frequency is a poetry generator written in Ruby, and part of a larger constrained writing process. The lines of all the poems in Frequency are constrained by the fact that I used only 200 of the most common English words in them. The poems generated by Frequency are built from a pool of 2000 lines I wrote. The process of writing the lines was not aided by the machine and was painstaking work. I wrote a set of ten lines beginning with each word, only using the other words in this list in the rest of the line. It is perhaps not unsurprisingly difficult to make meaningful expressions with such a limited vocabulary, but in the end I was surprised by how flexible these base units of our language can be. The poetry generator itself runs from a command line interface, and can algorithmically assemble poems according to a number of different rhyme scheme, syllabic, and spatial criteria. For the the 2009 Grand Text Auto Exhibition at the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois, I developed a routine within the generator that could produce a large collection of poems with one command, and then produced a set of 2000 variants of Frequency poems that will cycle for a long period in a web-browser-based installation demonstrating some poetry produced by the program.

(Source: Author's description)