Tim Stutts: ITP Project Blog

A collaborative effort between ITP’s Nick Hasty and myself, this application generates Haikus based on writing entries found on different environmental issues in Wikipedia. The results are frequently ironic and serve as a sort of chance commentary on the natural world and it’s relationship to mankind. Java concordance trees and regular expressions were used to extract key words to form a database. A future version will rely on RSS feeds, to continually update the public on current environmental and political affairs; a series of poetic hyperlinks. For now please demo the Beta version we’ve made in Processing here. Refreshing the browser will result in a new Haiku.

Poems that Haiku News has turned out so far…

ITP’s Nick Hasty has joined the Haiku News team.

We aren’t in a position to use RSS feeds yet, so in an attempt to
keep the material for the haiku generator nature themed we have
chosen to look up environment related words in Wikipedia, grab all of
the text from the introductory paragraph for each word, and dump them
into a larger text file. These words are as follows:
environmentalism, Green Peace, global warming, solar power, nuclear
power, nuclear weapons, petroleum, endangered species, ecosystem,
pollution, tobacco, cannabis, hunting, lumber, water treatment,
whaling, recycling, Sierra Club, Blue Green Alliance, invasive
species, agriculture, genetically modified organisms, organic farming,
organic food, Food and Drug Administration, biological warfare, giant
panda, african elephant, asiatic cheetah, blue whale, and eastern
gorilla. For added spice we included entries for George Walker Bush
and Osama bin Laden.

Read more

We live in a day and age when the news is updated by the minute. This is a great resource to us, but at the same time, it can cloud the mind with an overabundance of information.

Haiku News simplifies. It takes an RSS feed from a chosen news site, and creates click-able poem links in the traditional format of five seven five, using a content-scanning, syllable-counting algorithm. Poems are composed and published online just moments after a breaking news story.