spc476/NaNoGenMo-2014

                        THE QUANTUM SUPPOSITION OF OZ

                          "Written" by Sean Conner.
                Based up on the works of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

  This is an entry for the 2014 NaNoGenMo [1] written in about a day.  It
takes as its input the works of L.  Frank Baum, specifically, his fourteen
Oz novels obtained from Project Gutenberg [2].  I can't way why I chose the
Oz novels, other than I had them handy and it makes for a decent number of
words (764,239, but more on that number in a bit) for generating a Markov
chain of order 3.

  The corpus was edited to remove any extraneous text that isn't part of the
main narrative of the story---not only does this removal include the Project
Gutenberg licesening, but the table of contents, and any forwards or
introductions included with the books, as well as page numbers and
indications of embedded images.

  The body of work was then read in and broken apart into words, and this is
where most of the time was spent, in defining what a "word" means in this
context.  Basically, I considered punctuation marks, end of paragraphs and
numbers as words, in addition to those comprised normally of letters (with
the occasional aprostophe, like "'tis" or "I'll," or with the occasional
hyphen, such as "wood-chopper" or "shoulder-joint" or even with both, like
"how-d'ye-do."  Other exceptions are "Mr.," "Dr." and the like, taken care
of specifically.  

  The reason I included punctuation marks and the end of paragraphs as
"words" is to break the work up and prevent a large "wall-of-text" that so
often happens when using a Markov chain to generate text.

  The sample novel, _The Quantum Supposition_of_Oz_, is named such because
the input consists of all the Oz novels written by L. Frank Baum and as
such, is a quantum supposition of all of Oz (at least, Oz as told by Baum). 
This is just one such novel and there are others to be found.  Or generated. 
Or ignored.  It's up to you.

  Enjoy.

[1]	https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014

[2]	https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Oz