Month: April 2017

The goal of my RWET final was to produce something that referenced current news headlines but incorporated text from fictional worlds like Star Wars and Adventure Time.

Things I was thinking about while working on this:

• I mostly read news
• Headlines tend to favor “man bites dog” narrative
• Increasing concern with “fake” news and propaganda
• Fire hose of news online
• Escapism

I mainly used the Spacy natural language processing library to accomplish this although I tried a number of different approaches.

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Real news for a fictional world:

The idea I have for the final is to create a sort of news service for fictional worlds. My thinking right now is that I’ll work on something that reads in current headlines, picks one (or maybe uses all of them) to construct a headline for a fictional (e.g. TV or video game) universes. My plan is to use spaCy to pick out noun phrases and other parts of speech and then replace them with similar parts of speech from Wikia fandom pages. This may include descriptions of the articles as well. Ideally this will create a natural contrast with the idea narrative of “fake news”. Here are some examples done by hand:

I’m still trying to figure out how the presentation of this will work, maybe I will read it like a newspaper. I’m not sure if it should come from one fandom or multiple.

This week I took my headline gathering script and applied the Ngram and Markov chain library to it. After adjusting the length of the N grams and trying out some “key” words I ended up with something rather simple but effective in terms of this confusion of news and time effect I’m going for. Basically I take all of my headlines and pass them through Generate_from_tokens function to create new headlines with an Ngram length of 6. I liked the results here because the headlines are typically generated but occasionally repeating the source material so when you read through a list of them its unclear whats real and what isn’t. Also some of them worked out to be kinda funny. Here are some of the highlights:

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