[rwet week 7] midterm: please visit the forum

For my midterm, I made a “new” poetic form I’m calling “Please Visit The Forum.”

There are a lot of forums on the internet, covering pretty much all imaginable subjects for all sorts of niche interests and communities. I wanted to generate new weirdo community forums, each including a URL, moderator name, contact info and some popular topics.

I downloaded a bunch of JSON files from Corpora, and then picked two of those files each time. I then mashed the words together in different ways for each of the categories.

While I found Corpora delightful and very useful, I could only figure out how to make this work for a limited group of lists that were formatted in the same way (so that I could consistently grab the values from a specific key in each list).

My goal was to capture the feeling of surprise and intrigue that you get from discovering a niche community on the internet that you didn’t know about before, and some of the results of my program I thought were pretty effective.

I think this is this could be more effective and interesting with a larger data set, perhaps with more live data or something more generative. Hopefully I can explore that with later projects.

https://gist.github.com/nicolehe/77996f26a2286fbf8dfd.js