For this midterm assignment I wanted to work and play with generative text, grabbing text form personal blogs in the web. Using the logic of the Exquisite Corpse, the program, based on a word chosen by the user, starts to find it into the first text file and extracts the word and the 11 words that follows. Then, the last word extract became the keyword that the program will look in the following text and the process starts to repeat itself till it doesn't find more phrases.
To make the process easier, I started by copying text from 5 blogs and pasting into separate txt files, simulating different url's and what the crawler could get.
The next stop will be creating the crawler to look on the web for personal blogs.
The result needs to be tuned a little more but once I get the crawler working, I can see better the results and improve the program.
here are some examples of the output:
see source code
One idea of where this could go is to create a fake blog, writing a program that everyday crawl personal blogs, search for posts with the same date and using this set rules, creates a "fake" post or a mash/up post.
It was an interesting exercise to get my hands in regular expressions and feel more comfortable with programming in java