by Zoe Pollock
Justin Ellis applauds a new project from the NYT’s James Harris:
Times Haiku is a collection of what they are calling “serendipitous poetry,” derived from stories that have made the homepage of NYTimes.com. The haiku live on a Tumblr hosted by the Times. Harris built a script that mines stories for haiku-friendly words and then reassembles them into poetry. (For those of you that may have zoned out in class, haiku are comprised of three lines with, in order, five, seven, and five syllables.) The code checks words against an open source pronunciation dictionary, which handily also contains syllable counts.
“Sometimes it can be an ordinary sentence in context, but pulled out of context it has a strange comedy or beauty to it,” Harris said. … The result, much like @nytimes_ebooks, is bizarre, quirky, and kind of zen.
As Harris explains on the About page, it’s not a strict interpretation of the form:
Most of us first encountered haikus in a grade school, when we were taught that they are three-line poems with five syllables on the first line, seven on the second and five on the third. According to the Haiku Society of America, that is not an ironclad rule. A proper haiku should also contain a word that indicates the season, or “kigo,” as well as a juxtaposition of verbal imagery, known as “kireji.” That’s a lot harder to teach an algorithm, though, so we just count syllables like most amateur haiku aficionados do.
But it’s got a solid foundation:
Articles covering sensitive subjects are not scanned for potential haikus, and the bot knows to skip anything with awkward sentence construction. … “Over time we’ve added syllable counts for words like ‘Rihanna‘ or ‘terroir,’” the haiku Tumblr reports. Yesterday, Harris posted on Twitter that he was adding syllable counts for “gewürztraminer, vindaloo, sabermetrics, esoterica, mortarboard, defenestrate, koan, nametag, ceramicist…”
One more cool fact via Ellis: the blue lines behind the haiku are computer generated, based on the meter of the first line of text.
(Image: Times Preschool Haiku)
The Dish 