Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@celinenguyen
Created March 4, 2014 05:18
Show Gist options
  • Star 0 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 0 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save celinenguyen/d887b605da30b07ee390 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save celinenguyen/d887b605da30b07ee390 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.

Information visualization: Poetry and Rap = Found Mashup Poetry

I want to:

  • the weight of rain
  • expected relationships, rigorously shown
  • meaningful adjacencies
  • data in a way that promotes intuition and immediate emotional response
  • explain the domain area and some cultural factors/situations/unique aspects about it
  • artistic delight
  • highlight unexpected connections & context with the rest of the world
  • it's ok to be subjective/focused with the visualization!

I do not want to:

  • just count things
  • just encode things in attractive but opaque iconography
  • have too much data to the point that occludes meaning

Feedback from Golan:

  • don't be afraid to have a point of view: make the choice to look at a single topic or theme
    • brand names? consumerism in music, cultural zeitgeist
    • emotional analysis
    • love and heartbreak
    • just investigate one poet/artist and their preoccupations with:
      • love
      • revenge
      • branding
      • emotions and emotional spread
    • men vs women: how much do men talk about women? men about men? women about women/men? Bechdel test
  • be specific, like the body parts of lyrics (also note how the rebus things show just body parts and other words as dots)
  • generating the text is a lot of work and if the purpose is to display differences between things, this doesn't cut it
  • narrow down the dta set to find something specific and interesting

Summary

  • mash up poetry and rap (found poetry, use quotes or k-grams)
    • visualize graph of generated text?
  • how to connect poems given limited data?

Visualization

  • small multiples to compare corpora
  • ratio of nouns to verbs
  • ratio of nouns and verbs to other things
  • positive versus negative words
  • swearing
  • sexual content
  • pronouns: I/you/me
  • average content length (words/lines)
  • average line length (syllables/words)


Music?

Ideas

  • villanelles out of song lyrics from different genres, artists
    • sentiment analysis and literacy analysis
    • find most common nouns/verbs as endings
    • use TV Tropes information (here’s Kanye’s page)
  • blackout poetry
  • visual presentation predicated by metadata/beat/&c of the music
  • remix poetry and music? poetry and rap?
    • find most similar artists

Sources

Tools

Possible concerns

  • lyric lines too short? connect them with
  • how to deal with sparse n-grams?

Poets

  • Yusef Komunyakaa
  • Pablo Neruda

Artists

  • Regina Spektor
  • Arcade Fire
  • Theophilus London
  • Aesop Rock
  • Kanye West
  • Azealia Banks
  • Notorious B.I.G.

Process

  • Scrape for sets of poems and lyrics (just title/author/text)
    • for lyrics, ignore [Hook], [Verse 2], x2, (x2) and similar
  • Process to a good format (individual text files for each)

What is the visualization?

  • display where each phrase comes from (song + artist/poem + poet)
  • mood of songs
  • morph poetry styles
  • which poetic forms?

Ideas

  • tweet couplets: one from poem, one from song; one from rap
  • clear juxtaposition/genre identity
  • make a Twitter account out of it
  • rap haikus
  • rhyming connects unexpected sources together

Inspired by

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment