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in reply to Re: Tolstoy Chains
in thread Tolstoy Chains

A day in the life of a troubled Irishman.

I remember back in the 80s reading a bit in National Lampoon magazine the gist of which was Cliff's Notes on Cliff's Notes. It was for students who didn't even have time to read the Cliff's Notes to cram for their Lit reading exams. Each book was boiled down to a one-sentence synopsis. The only one that I recall was Crime and Punishment: "A man kills a woman and feels bad." The whole bit was brilliant, though.

Feed The Naked Lunch to your chain and see what you get. That should be interesting, because in essence Burrows had his own Markov chain cranking away in his head.

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Re: Re: Re: Tolstoy Chains
by andyf (Pilgrim) on May 11, 2004 at 23:56 UTC
    Yes nimdoc, rather uncanny I agree. Anyway I think we are a long way from Lingua::Lit::Condense yet but it would great for students indeed.
    Imagine,
    condense prideandprejudice.txt
"Human bonding is complex"
condense oneflewover.txt
"Insanity is relative"
condense 1984.txt
"Government watches people"

cool!

    [download]
    Anyway, I searched ibiblio/gutenberg and turned found no lunch nor on Google. Which confirms there is no free lunch. I found a couple of excerpts though to cat together. They were formatted pretty weirdly so a quick blast with
    
perl -pi -e 's/\W/ /g' lunch.txt

    [download]

    and we lost all the punctuation, which imho is best for this sort of pseudo science (the loss of symbols to untrapped punctuation outweighs their syntactic value).

    Anyway Burrows ....

    I have picked the choice few sentences out of 15 or so, truncated some,

    Old Pete men suck the Florida tan the same about you
    taboos curses and subway is lurking in Washington Square a cell of rotten
    he has scored he cruises the same dirty junky he hangs off
    Thanks kid I am evidently his sharkskin suit
    And the bodys string of inquiry ruling that anesthizes his enveloping presence
    all over from shooting in my kid I ll wipe your release


    - absolute filth imho, but who should concerned mothers sue? Mr Markov or Mr Burrows?, or Me?.

    Still searching for Joyce.

    Andy
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      My background is in English Lit, this poses some interesting possibilities. I find it intersting that Markov came up with all this while looking at and analysing poetry. I wonder how many English prof's have heard about this or tried it.
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In Section Perl Poetry