Sunday, February 25, 2018

  In my essay about self-generating texts, I mentioned the possibility of using dice to generate e-poetry.  For this blog post, I decided to try out this idea.  For fun, I used the first stanza of the "Barney Theme Song."  Since the first stanza contains eighteen words, I used a twenty sided die, rerolling if the die showed nineteen or twenty.  Each word was only used once. 

My chart looked like this:

  1. Barney
  2. is
  3. a
  4. dinosaur
  5. from
  6. our
  7. imagination
  8. and
  9. when
  10. he's
  11. tall
  12. he's
  13. what
  14. we
  15. call
  16. a
  17. dinosaur
  18. sensation  
  Here are my results:

  1.  a
  2. sensation
  3. he's
  4. dinosaur
  5. he's
  6. call
  7. our
  8. and
  9. from
  10. what
  11. Barney
  12. tall
  13. imagination
  14. is
  15. when
  16. dinosaur
  17. we
  18. a
   Does this new "poem" belong to me, the creators of Barney, or the dice?  As I wrote in my essay, any new poetry from a text generator, whether digital or manual, should belong to the original author of the words.  I highly doubt, however, that Barney or his friends are in any hurry to claim this masterpiece.