!!Con West 2019 - Max Kreminski: Making blackout poetry with computers!

Presented at !!Con West 2019: http://bangbangcon.com/west Blackout poetry creatively subverts a source text by blacking out most of its words with a marker or other writing implement, in the process revealing a poem hidden within. I like blackout poetry so much, I decided to teach my computer to turn any arbitrary web page into blackout poetry at the press of a button. In this talk, I’ll discuss why blackout poetry is cool; what we might learn from teaching computers to create it; and how I went about building a browser extension that could generate moderately coherent blackout poetry from arbitrary English text. Then I’ll go over why and how I ended up transforming my blackout poetry generator into a mixed-initiative blackout poetry composition tool that brings a human poet back into the loop!