Text and Pop Culture
A series of experiments around text using pop culture objects (ITP projects)
Developer
Programming A to Z, Fall 2015
September - December 2015 (1-2 weeks per project)
Pop culture is a subject that I've been passionate about for a long time, from the evolution of storytelling in mediums like video games and television to the treatment of female characters in media. A large amount of pop culture is centered around text artifacts: books, comics, analytical literature, and more; so I experimented with playing with text related to pop culture over the course of a semester.
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Classics Madlibs
Can a computer be used to recreate the fun of a party game with some of the human interaction removed? Classics Madlibs takes some of the most famous first passages in literature and programmatically creates a game of Madlibs for a person to play solo.
Parts of Speech Visualized
Schools teach certain novels based on their thematic relevance, but does the increased use of certain parts of speech correlate to the readability of classic literature? I built a visualization tool that showed the breakdown of parts of speech used in a novel and did a brief analysis of Jane Austen's work from 1813-1817 to test my hypothesis using my visualization tool and the Flesch Readability Calculator to measure readability. I also ran the tools with the first three novels of A Song of Ice and Fire.
Black Widow Bot
The dearth of diversity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and media adaptations of comics in general) along with the outcry that was raised when the merchandise was released for Avengers: Age of Ultron inspired me to create this Twitter bot, which tweeted possible movies that Marvel would make before they would consider a Black Widow movie. I scraped data from the Marvel API to pull male characters from the comics and generated a random movie before adding #butnoblackwidow (my tag to track my tweets) and #wewantwidow (the trending Twitter tag).