Blog Assignment #4

The creation of the iPad and Kindle reader have changed the way we read books, newspapers, and magazines forever. With your focus being on the screen, you no longer have to carry a bunch of books with you, nor do you have to worry about returning them to the library or keeping them in good condition. With just a few touches of the screen, you can have access to a world of any type of literature you choose and can read dozens of books by just scrolling up and down on your device. 20 or 30 years ago, this concept would have been deemed as absurd to many and yet today it is a reality that we are living. Part of that reality is with authors and publishers, now needing to think about how to involve the utilization of the screens in their publications.

I do believe however that traditional reading is something that will not be lost regardless of what is done to publications on screens. Yes, reading a book on a Kindle or Ipad is different then flipping through the pages of a physical book however, once the reader is fully engaged into reading the story, what platform the story is in becomes a bit irrelevant. History has proven that people will read no matter what other technology is at hand. When the film was invented, it was believed that at some point down the line, it would lead to the extinction of physical books and readings. It was also believed that newspapers were at some point going to become non-existent when the development of the radio and then the television began. None of the above proved to be true and although the radio, film, and television industries have all become multi-million dollar industries, none have replaced the selling of books, or the purchasing of newspapers.

The Internet is the next technology that many people believe will bring an end to the newspaper and book publishing industries, and statistics have proven that the internet is the cause of a steady decline in both. However, because new technologies are developing much faster than humans are aging, I don’t feel that books will be completely replaced by the Internet either.

Original lines for Text Generation poems

Yes I know I’m about a month late, but lets just say its been a hell of a semester for me. Anyway, I never got to post up the original lines that I used as models for Project 3 so here they are:

1.) “A boy becomes a man, who learns to understand, That success teaches more than a school ever can. A Girl becomes a lady,Who learns of having babies, And learns that its the man that usually drives her crazy.”

2.) “We turn movements into music and call it onomatopoeia. Nobody’s done it like we do it, you can call us pioneers. Ya are not ya own men, got masters watchin ya like overseers. We spittin flames and gotcha burnin like a chick with gonorrhea.”

3.) “Everything that takes a ride up must soon come down, the key to life is to have your smiles outweigh your frowns. We all struggle but our struggles are all for a purpose, so never feel as if your mistakes have made you worthless.”

Interesting how those text generators change things syntactically.

Text generation

In working with text generators, I have been working with eGnoetry and the Electronic Poetry Kit from “Language is a Virus:Poetry Generator”. I am not completely aware of all of the uses of the electronic poetry kit but the one thing I have been working with one of the word banks that is provided. The word banks are created from a collection of words from certain movies or famous authors. I chose to use the word bank that is provided with words from the Borat movie. I took words from the given word bank and pieced them together to create sentences. Now the challenge in doing this is that I was not provided with many conjuctive words like and, but, the, ….etc. This made the generation of proper sentences extremely difficult. I then took the sentences I’ve pieced together and put them into eGnoetry as a “model text” and then used eGnoetry to generate a poem that makes sense with the “Borat” words. eGnoetry is a rather easy tool to use to generate poetry and the few models that they have can help you create hundreds of different poems. What I don’t like about eGnoetry is when you put in your own model, it isn’t as versatile as when you use one of the models that the generator already has when it comes to the variations in words. Or maybe the model I put in isn’t something It understands?

Infoaesthetic Display

Infoaesthetic Display

Still figuring out some perks but this was the infoaesthetic display we had to get done for this weeks class. I used ManyEyes.com which is a very unique online, data visualization assistance site.

My Intro, or something like it

Welcome to my Blog. I’m hoping to graduate from NJIT this upcoming August with my BA in Marketing. 19 credits now and 4 in the summer certainly wont be easy though. Then again, nothing will bring more joy into my life than graduating because its been a much longer road than I’ve expected. I swear college is too much of a business. Anyway, I’m a very social person although 95% of the time that I am at school, I’m alone. I love sports, particularly basketball, football, and baseball and I love music, which probably would’ve been easier to guess if I just would’ve opened this blog by saying that I’m in a band. Check us out at www.reverbnation.com/xcstacy ..I promise it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard before but you’ll enjoy it.

I think I can get used to blogging although its nothing I’ve ever consistently done before. Hopefully this is the beginning of something fun.