Welcome to the Really System e-lit & Web Writing Lab

This page contains links and resources for participants in the CNY2017 THATCamp e-lit & web writing session.

the web is not read-only

text + interactivity = fun

you don't need to know how to write a computer program to write a computer program

e-literature includes "works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer."

• History Lesson
• Stephanie Strickland & Ian Hatcher, House of Trust
• Amaranth Borsuk, Between Page & Screen
• Allison Parrish, I Waded in Clear Water
• Mark Sample, JustToSayBot (et al.)

some things I've done

• TheAgeDemanded.info, made by me with the help of Kate Compton's Tracery (below) & Ernest Hemingway.
• Poem Prompt Generator, made by me with the help Library of Congress Children’s Subject Headings & HathiTrust Digital Library.
• EPIC POEM SLOWLY TWEETED
• Hygiene In Reading (book of prose poems manually/electronically cannibalized from Edmund Burke Huey's 1908 volume The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading; with a Review of the History of Reading and Writing and of Methods, Texts, and Hygiene in Reading

free simple software & tools for making/unmaking texts

• txt.fyi is, per its creator Rob Beschizza, "the dumbest publishing platform on the web." An easy way to get text on the web to share and destroy. Like, here's a little bit of John Cage's Silence I copypasted from the Internet Archive.
• Tracery is a super-simple tool and language to generate text, by Kate Compton (GalaxyKate). It pairs nicely with George Buckenham's Cheap Bots, Done Quick!.
• a bot-tutorial by Robin Camille Davis that will get you looking at some python!

Bookmarklets for changing text on webpages
Click here to see how to install and activate these.

• Edit Page bookmarklet (drag that link text to your bookmarks toolbar) This bookmarklet allows you to edit text in a webpage; we're going to use this to revise our own texts in a browser. You can also use it to make hilarious fraudulent webpages.
• The Deletionist (drag that link text to your bookmarks toolbar) is a bookmarklet that will disappear most of the text on a webpage, giving you an automatic erasure poem. More on that here.
• KICK ASS is a bookmarklet that will allow you to slowly destroy text on a webpage like the whole internet is a game of Asteroids™. More on Kick Ass here.
• fontBomb (drag that link text to your bookmarks toolbar) allows you to set bombs in text and destroy regions of them. More on fontBomb here.
• textexture bookmarlet instantly submit the text of any webpage to texttexture, linked below.

Tools for analyzing & visualizing texts

• Voyant Tools "See through your text..." Word frequencies, word clouds, & more, with stop lists. Look at one text or compare many texts.
• Wordwanderer explore and compare common words in a text visually.
• Textalyser detailed statistics on readability, lexical density, common multi-word phrases, and sentence length.
• textexture visualize any text as a network. (free registration required)
• Bubbl.us graphically organize texts & outlines.
• Wordle word clouds from cut-and-paste or from URLs.
• Concordle wordle + concordancing.
• Wordtree map texts and see words used in multiple contexts.
• I Write Like compare your text to famous writers' styles.

More favorite websites for messing with text

• Applied Poetics an in-browser app designed by Doug Luman
• Text Mechanic: Add/Remove Line Breaks
• Text Mechanic: Sort Lines lots of ways
• SortMyList.com sorts items (even comma/period separated lists) many ways & allows you some transformation tools.
• RandomizeList.com
• Cut & Paste Javascript Word Count; Character count
• RANDOM.ORG, a site full of different randomly generated things, like sequences, hexadecimal colors, and geocoordinates.

Corpora to borrow from

• The Corpus of Contemporary English (1990-2012)
• Wikipedia Corpus
• The Time Magazine Corpus (1923-2006)
• The Corpus of Historical English (1810-2009)
• Corpus of American Soap Operas (2001-2012)
• More corpora and tools at corpus.byu.edu.

Rapid fire writing prompts you can use with these tools can be found here.