Make Shift

[knoxdw]

Repository, text, and pdf.

This work arranges sentences and phrases from historical sources, making use of sentence similarity calculations based on word embeddings provided by the SpaCy NLP library in Python.

To scaffold a book-length structure, I turned to a site called TVMaze and drew on their API to extract sentences describing episodes of a reality TV show called The Apprentice. To build up some contrast, balance, and historical depth, I extracted sentences from the platform of the U.S. Republican Party during presidential election years during its first two decades. I also included sentences from an edition of Russell Conwell's "Acres of Diamonds" speech.

Finally, a certain poetic suggestiveness comes from drawing on Grenville Kleiser's century-old Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases, which I stumbled across in a used bookstore. (It's engaging enough in its quirkiness that LibriVox readers have read the whole thing aloud.)

To put all this together, I used SpaCy's existing English-language word embedding model to compare sentence similarity. I took the sentences summarizing the TV episodes in their original order. Each sentence generates a two-paragraph block by drawing on the other sources.

It was interesting to experiment with paragraph-level structures and try to get some sense of continuity in variety that might work at larger scales.

[knoxdw]

Sample:

Like a game in which the important part is to keep from laughing, far-reaching influence, chance reflections, abandoned hope. Time and opportunity. The right to choose their representatives has been made of no effect. He spoke with a uniformity of emphasis that made his words stand out like the raised type for the blind.

Her voice had a wooden resonance and a ghost of a lisp. Clear and definite like the glance of a child or the voice of a girl. One candidate loses the team's seed money while another candidate simply loses their mind as they race against the clock to put together a fashionable presentation. But they are so rare a thing in fact that the newspapers talk about them all the time as a matter of news until you get the idea that all the other rich men got rich dishonestly. According to Mr. McCormick's confidential communication, so recently published, it was a West Virginia woman, who, after his father and he had failed altogether in making a reaper and gave it up, took a lot of shears and nailed them together on the edge of a board, with one shaft of each pair loose, and then wired them so that when she pulled the wire one way it closed them, and when she pulled the wire the other way it opened them, and there she had the principle of the mowing-machine. The proposition appeals to us as a good one. It will receive the same careful attention.

Like a pageant of the Golden Year, in rich memorial pomp the hours go by, golden opportunity, capacious mind, abandoned hope. Chance and opportunity. We reaffirm our opposition to further grants of the public lands to corporations and monopolies, and demand that the national domain be devoted to free homes for the people. The old books look somewhat pathetically from the shelves, like aged dogs wondering why no one takes them for a walk.

[hugovk]

Congratulations!

(I made a bot of Grenville Kleiser's Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases
https://twitter.com/15kphrases :)

[knoxdw]

It seems to call out for that, doesn't it? The ever-uncertain plausibility of the word "useful" in the title does a lot to make its idiosyncrasies especially fun. He must have been quite a character.