RESOURCES!

[dariusk]

This is an open issue where you can comment and add resources that might come in handy for NaNoGenMo.

NOTE: at some point I will turn this into a more organized document, probably on the wiki for this repo.

[dariusk]

A submission from @scottmadin:

Python Markov chains: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/PyMarkovChain/
Python internet archive api: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/internetarchive/0.4.4

Also, similar things in NodeJS:

https://npmjs.org/package/archive.org
https://npmjs.org/package/markov

[darkliquid]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/353274/story-telling-building-algorithms

[willf]

I wrote a "Samsa bot" that uses Bing's Ngram database to generate text. You might find it and the associated libraries useful (all Ruby).

https://github.com/willf/microsoft_ngram/blob/master/examples/samsabot.rb

General library:

https://github.com/willf/microsoft_ngram

[dariusk]

Since @willf is too humble to plug it, Wordnik is an indispensable resource for all things text-related: definitions, parts of speech, random words, rhymes, hypernyms, etc:

http://developer.wordnik.com/docs.html#!/word

[vitorio]

Here's a dump of my notes about generating stories:

@rfreebern researched this problem a few years back for this game project of his:

Curses! is a single-player open-ended adventure game with the basic premise that the player is a fairy tale villain bent on wrecking many potential fairy tales as completely as possible. Fairy tale plots would be generated on-the-fly based on a basic generator template that attempts to intelligently combine dozens or hundreds of very basic fairy tale elements to create situations that are both unique and familiar. The PC's goal is not to just thwart the happy ending but to do it thoroughly: not just kill the handsome prince, but cripple and disfigure him while making the princess hate him and get exiled from her kingdom, for example.

Fairy tales are really well-explored variants of the standard storytelling archetypes described by people like Joseph Campbell. There are a couple of ways that fairy tales are organized, which include their plot outlines (although not their cultural or moral implications): Aarne-Thompson, and Propp. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne-Thompson_classification_system

Propp's classification system has been used as the basis for a number of generators and is still the most-used mechanism in the academic literature for such things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp

Propp generators are things like: http://www.fdi.ucm.es/profesor/fpeinado/projects/kiids/apps/protopropp/

Clicking through to their later Bard system shows examples at the bottom, and that whole KIIDS things is for interactive narrative and computational narratology, which are the academic terms for this sort of thing (I call my work in this area automated storytelling with post-hoc computational narratives, as my use and implementation aren't for interaction).

Mark Finlayson's work out of MIT is a little more recent: http://www.mit.edu/~markaf/research.html

Plugging any of that research into Google Scholar and looking at recent citations of those papers are a good way to catch up.

The massively-multiplayer video game Star Wars Galaxies tried something along these lines with their Dynamic Points of Interest, but they weren't really well executed from a design and technical implementation perspective. They had a lot of potential, but Raph Koster describes their problems here: http://www.raphkoster.com/2010/04/30/dynamic-pois/

Outside of fairy tales, there are works like Plotto, which provide narrative guides to plot generation, and the monomyth-related works by Campbell, etc.: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/01/06/plotto/

Plotto is actually in the public domain, and can be found in the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/plottonewmethodo00cook

And journalism is getting into it, too. A program at Northwestern worked out so well, taking sports stats and turning them into sports articles, they didn't publish much research at all and went right into a startup. The Wired article is here: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/all/1

The one paper I found by the Northwestern group cites one major paper from 1977 about "Tale-spin." You can look for citations from the Tale-spin article, and that brings up some interesting recent work from elsewhere: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8316499405683938909&as_sdt=5,44&sciodt=0,44&hl=en

Finally, there's this failed Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/storybricks/storybricks-the-mmorpg-storytelling-toolset

Even more finally, I also found this PDF in a second set of notes: https://research.cc.gatech.edu/inc/content/sequential-recommendation-approach-interactive-personalized-story-generation

[darrentorpey]

Thanks, @vitorio! That looks helpful.

[smadin]

(OK, I made a github account.)
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wikipedia/1.0.3 is a python interface to wikipedia, which may also be helpful for the quick-and-dirty Markov-chain approach. It was very easy to hack together a script to fetch random Wikipedia tables for source text and churn out a "novel" of a given word-count.

[nickheer]

SC Chen's Simple HTML DOM Parser for PHP.

[dariusk]

While in-browser DOM manipulation is obviously ruled by jQuery, my favorite NodeJS DOM parser/manipulator is Cheerio, which uses jQuery-style selectors.

Also if you're in Ruby and need to do HTML/XML parsing, Nokogiri rules the roost.

[rfreebern]

I'm hanging out in #nanogenmo on FreeNode if anyone wants to join. We can toss ideas around on a casual basis there.

[dariusk]

For those who aren't super IRC-literate, or just don't want to install an irc client, you can go here, pick a username, and visit #nanogenmo from your web browser:

http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#nanogenmo

[jiko]

The Bard project looks awesome. Thanks @vitorio!

[jiko]

Some Python resources:

• Natural Language Toolkit. This library is pretty huge and academic.
• Pattern. Even more huge and academic.
• TextBlob. Still lots of features but more approachable.

[agladysh]

An article about generator of Recursive Fairy Tales in Haskell (in Russian): http://habrahabr.ru/post/136007/

Google Translate: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fhabrahabr.ru%2Fpost%2F136007%2F