#gifandcircumstance by Allison Parrish

Screen capture from #gifandcircumstance by Adam Parrish. Team Illuminate's glow in the dark dance from America's Got Talent. Text: "If I were your man..."
Open #gifandcircumstance by Allison Parrish

This bot mines the Twitter stream for phrases starting with “when,” extracts the clauses, and joins each phrase with a randomly selected animated GIF in a Tumblr. Here’s a more detailed description from Parrish’s blog:

A “#whatshouldwecallme-style tumblr” is one in which animated GIFs are paired with a title expressing a circumstance or mood—usually a clause beginning with “when.” I wrote a Python script to make these kinds of posts automatically. Here’s what it does:

(1) Search Twitter for tweets containing the word “when.”
(2) Extract the “when” clause from such tweets.
(3) Use Pattern to identify “when” clauses with suitable syntax (i.e., clauses in which a subject directly follows “when”; plus some other heuristic fudging)
(4) Post the “when” clause as the title of a tumblr post, along with an animated GIF randomly chosen from the imgur gallery.

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“@georgelazenby” by Anonymous

Open “@georgelazenby” by Anonymous

This Twitter account is part of an artistic and literary performance in social media, consisting of short poetic snippets of Surrealism, the absurd, textual, photographic, and video entries, dark humor, and links to the other component of the project, a Tumblr site aptly URL’d http://lazenby.tumblr.com (depicted below).

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“Google Poetics” by Sampsa Nuotio and Raisa Omaheimo

Screen capture of "Google Poetics by Sampsa Nuotio and Raisa Omaheimo. Google Search's autocomplete feature provides search suggestions that are oddly poetic. Text: "(Autocomplete options for the phrase 'I need to') / ...lose weight / ...know / ...make money / ...lose weight fast"
Open “Google Poetics” by Sampsa Nuotio and Raisa Omaheimo

This found poem generator has been hiding in plain sight since October 16, 2010, since it is built into most of our Web browsers and in the Google main page. It is the Google Autocomplete feature (formerly a Google Labs feature called Google Suggest), which uses one of the largest crowd-sourced data sets in Internet history— Google searches— to suggest search strings to users as they type into their search windows. Nuotio and Omaheimo explain how we can find poetry in this space:

Google Poetics is born when Google autocomplete suggestions are viewed as poems.

Google’s algorithm offers searches after just a few keystrokes when typing in the search box, in an attempt to predict what the user wants to type. The combination of these suggestions can be funny, absurd, dadaistic – and sometimes even deeply moving.

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