Digital Found Poetry: New York Times Haiku

[primeideal]

The first "digital found poetry" blog I'd like to link to is the New York Times Haiku.

 

This Tumblr blog uses a computer program to count syllables in single sentences that appear in Times articles; it looks for sentences where the spaces of the words allow for a five/seven/five syllable haiku. I got into the blog in late May, with sports haiku such as

 

"The stadium was

visible in silhouette,

like a waning moon."

 

One of the things that intrigues me about these kinds of websites is the ratio of human to machine control. With the setup in place, nobody has to count syllables--they just turn the program loose on the articles, and let it go. However, an explanatory page notes that "human journalists select it and post it on this blog" when they find a worthwhile poem. It's not clear how many they have to reject, before posting a good one. Read Jacob Harris' About page over here. So there's some degree of choice when it comes to the "found" aspect of poetry--but the clear-cut rules for syllable count allow some objective metric of what qualifies as a haiku, for the purposes of this project. (Unsurprisingly, more complicated and subjective rules like "a haiku should include a kigo word that indicates the season" have been relaxed here.)

 

And yes, this was run by actual employees of the New York Times, which amuses me--you'd think maybe someone else would have come up with the idea and threw their program at the first highbrow publication that came to mind, but no, it's an in-house affair!

 

They also decided that they wanted to make their posts as images rather than plain text, the former option maybe a little more in keeping with the Tumblr usage? Personally, I'm not sure how much the project gains from that setup, but others may disagree.

 

Enjoy the archives!

Comments

[alexseanchai]

The Tumblr loses something by being images-only, actually. Accessibility. People who could read this text via screenreader can't read text on images unless there's alt text, and I have yet to discern how to alt-text an image on Tumblr.

[primeideal]

I know when I'm reading on my phone it takes longer for the image to load, but that's not really worth getting worked up about. Your example is more relevant. To their credit, they incorporate the text in their tags, but I'm not sure how well screen readers handle those.

[lnhammer]

The are a weird mixture of text and image -- I can select and copy-paste the text in the original post, but the archives store the post as an image.

I love this, but because they post so much I find myself not keeping up or reading it daily -- usually just dipping in for a dose every so often before moving on.

---L.

[habite]

For some reason the site won't load for me... huh. It seems like an interesting concept though - and one that will only continue to get more interesting.

I wonder if it would be possible to do this sort of thing with scans of Classic novels/plays etc?

[primeideal]

Hmm, yeah, looks like most of the New York Times website is down for me. Sorry!

I think it could be, yeah, if you had the right format for the input text.

in lieu of the archives being up

[jjhunter]

Here's a sampling three favorites of mine from the project.

Re: your other point - intriguing! I bet the same code would work for book texts from Project Gutenberg.

[jjhunter]

Three favorites of mine from the project:

I think now would be
a great time to get the harsh
message across

("A haiku from the article: My Son’s Grades Are Too High")

Archivists are the
specialists who snatch objects
from oblivion

("A haiku from the article: Archivists Bringing Past Into Future Are Now Less Cloistered")

But I trust my core,
I trust my values and I
trust Canadians.

("A haiku from the article: Justin Trudeau in His Father’s Footsteps, Only More Uphill")

[perfectworry]

Thank you for this link. I gave it to some teachers at the school where I work because it fits in so perfectly with their current unit, which is about using creativity to share about current events/issues.

[primeideal]

Awesome! Glad to be of service. ;)