Nightingale is a Chrome browser extension that fills the web with literary pop-up ads containing lines from Keats's 1819 odes ("Ode to Psyche," "Ode on Indolence," "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "To Autumn").
The resonances between lines of Keats's verse and fragments of web pages are painstakingly encoded as a series of 136 regular expressions, each itself a close-reading that tries to consider what echoes there may be between the specific lines and sites I might visit. For instance, web-text matching the regular expression:
/\b[A-Z]\w+d (songs|melodies) are\b|\bthose \w+ are \w+er\b|\b\w+s are sweet\b/i
will trigger a pop-up containing the lines:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter
The easiest way to install Nightingale is via the Chrome Web Store.
The directory in this repo called extension can also be downloaded and installed directly.
Nightingale is highly personalized software; the regular expressions that match web-text to Keats's odes encode my no-doubt idiosyncratic interpretations of this verse. Should someone else want to rework these connections, or to use Nightingale to fill their experience of the internet with literature other than Keats, extension/patterns.js can simply be filled with other (regex, quote) pairs.
Nightingale assumes that seeing the same lines from Keats pop up too frequently could breed resentment. It tracks in localStorage when a particular quotation from Keats was last inserted as a pop-up into a page I have visited, and the quotation will only reappear after a certain amount of time has elapsed (by default, 3 days).
Nightingale is also available as a extension for the experimental iOS mobile browser Insight. To activate Nightingale on Insight, create a custom extension with this recipe. This injects the javascript from nightingale_mobile.js in this repo.
The mobile version does keep track of recently-seen quotes with localStorage. However, it does contain a mobile-specific feature: scrolling a Twitter feed will prompt the program to continuously check newly-revealed (dynamically-loaded) tweets for possible matches.
Another currently mobile-only feature: clicking on the Keatsian pop-up will open a window with the corresponding poem.