What Can Programmers and Writers Learn From One Another?
Can code be poetic?
As a poet before a coder, I apply my poetic process to my coding process.
Actually, I apply my poetic process to all things in life. When I write poetry, I am constructing a visualization of my scattered thoughts and emotions and essentially creating a musical piece that should flow from beginning to end.
If I don’t like how my poetry sounds when I try to perform it as a piece, I rewrite the whole thing. When I’m coding, I’m constructing a visualization of my scattered software development skills from different applications of my daily life. Yet I must have a flow that sings without interruption. No bugs. No faults. Something perfect in it’s own way but because words and structure are involved, it must similarly sing a flowing song that makes complete and utter sense.
Now, if you are a beginner to the world of coding and want to work on your coding skills and your wordplay skills, I have some suggestions for mini-projects to try on your own time.
Project Ideas for Combining Poetry and Technology
A Simple Poetry Generator Program
For this, you have several options. You can take different parts of sentences and store each in a data structure of your choosing. What I mean by this is store some words you like under verbs, adverbs, and adjectives (and obviously much more), and then go ahead and prompt the user to click a button that will likely say something like “Randomize” or “New Poem” to generate a poem. You can add some fancy features such as an awesome graphical user interface, or extra functionalities such as letting the user enter words into different data structures. The opportunities are endless!
Using Natural Language Understanding to Analyze Poetry
Choose a natural language library of your choice, and learn how to use the API to analyze some poetry that you have written, or maybe famous poems online. You can use sentiment analysis from IBM Watson’s AI API and try to learn how each word means something in correlation to other words around it. As a Linguistics and Computer Science major, things like this interest me. If this seems boring to you, feel free to add your own functionality or even rework this idea to fit your expertise.
If you need help working on these ideas, or have other ideas please share them with me at any time! I want to see more poets coding, and more coders engaging in poetry.
