Poetry and Parsing Text

In designing the code for my parsing application, I know of several artists that use the Cut'N'Mix application at http://www.cutnmix.com/ to generate ideas through text randomization. Personally, I like the use of the four tracks for mixing text. Similar to a neural network that uses the sliders as weights to select text to combine to generate the text output. Each track has two parameters, snip size and probability fader. Snip size is determines the number of consecutive words while the probability fader selects the probability that a random pick will be from a particular track. There are many features for transformation of the output based on this mixing idea. Figure 1 shows the user interface,

Figure 1. CutNMix Interface

In the Help section of the application, the author(s) state


"In 1997, the first version of Cut'n'Mix to include multi-source text mixing was released. The intention was to create the same kind of look-and-feel you might find in a 4-track audio cassette recorder but with the capability to mix text instead of sound. Subsequent versions added word shredding and gluing, morphing, swapping, random word fill, web page fill and a "custom wordbook" function to allow users to store their own word databases."



In thinking about the architecture here for this application, one gains insight into the how to utilize a parsing application for examining student's posts and in the process reveals ideas about writing poetry.