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Programming from A to Z
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Posted by Daniel (Nov 2005) (edit this)
Programming from A to Z
(Everything you wanted to know about text but were afraid to ask.)
Course Mailing List: http://forums.nyu.edu/cgi-bin/nyu.pl?enter=itp-text
Course Blog: http://www.shiffman.net/a2z
Course Presentation Schedule: http://www.shiffman.net/coursewiki/index.php?title=Presentations_A2Z
Office Hours Sign-Up: http://www.shiffman.net/coursewiki/index.php?title=Office_Hours
Syllabus (Spring 2006)
(tutorials, examples, readings, and assignments are on each individual week’s page)
Week 1 — The beginning
Beyond Processing and into Java
The String Class
File I/O
Simple Analysis
 
Week 2 — Regular Expressions
egrep
searching and replacing
Java regex package
 
Week 3 — The Concordance
Sorting, Binary Trees
A Simple Text Concordance
Reading:
Examples:
Assignment:
 
Week 4 — Analysis
Naive Bayesian Analysis - Spam Filtering
Word Adjacency, Probabilities
Reading:
Examples:
Assignment:
 
Week 5 — Spiders
Linked Lists, Hash Tables
A simple crawler
Reading:
Examples:
Assignment:
 
Week 6 — Mining
Deciphering HTML (yuck)
RSS, XML Feeds (mmm)
The Google API
Databases?
Reading:
Examples:
Assignment:
 
Week 7 — Midterm Workshop
Week 8 — Choose your own adventure
Guest speaker?
Simulating poetic form
Interactive Fiction, MUDs, IRC Bots, Digital Poetry
Reading:
Examples:
Assignment:
 
Week 9 — Generative Text
Random text
Genetic Algorithms
“Fractal” Text — L-Systems
Reading:
Examples:
Assignment:
 
Week 10 — Visualization
Returing to processing. . .
Flying text
Computational fonts. . .
guest?
 
Week 11 — final project workshop
Present final project ideas
 
Week 12 — final project workshop
guest speaker?
 
Week 13 — final project presentations
Week 14 — final project presentations
Course Description
There are 16,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg digital catalog. Google print is scanning millions. With all this digitized text, what can we do with it beyond simply search and browse? This course will focus on programming strategies and techniques behind procedural analysis and generation of text. We’ll explore topics ranging from evaluating text according to its statistical properties to the automated production of text via artificial intelligence. Student will be encouraged to develop their own systems and methods, from poetry machines to intelligent spiders to evolutionary language generators, etc. Examples will be demonstrated using Java and Processing with a focus on advanced data structures (linked lists, hash tables, binary trees) associated with storing and manipulating text. Prerequisite: H79.2233 Introduction to Computational Media or equivalent programming experience.
Homework
Students are required to complete a programming exercise each week (assignments to be specified on the weekly handouts linked above). Documenation for each assignment should be posted to the course blog http://www.shiffman.net/a2z. You will need to register for an account on the blog.
Presentations
Each student is required to make a “research” presentation once during the course of the semester to supplement the material presented in class. 2-3 people should sign up for each week (and can present as a group or separately.) The format for the presentations is extremely open (feel free to think creatively here). They should be brief (10-20 minutes, longer for 3 people) and could include any of the following: information on related projects, a history lesson, a performance/reading, links to online sources and tutorials, book reviews, source code examples, diagrams, etc. You should include a link to documentation of your talk on the presentation schedule wiki.
Some links:
class del.icio.us
Machines Visions: Towards a Poetics of Artificial Intelligence
The Nora Project
Electronic Literature Organization
Text Liberation Society
Oulipo
Gnoetry
Travesty
Computational Linguistics
Electronic Poetry Center
Jackson Mac Low
John Cage
Humument
Texts and Technology
Grand Text Auto
Google Poem Generator
Nick Montfort
TextMine
Linguistic Data Consortium at Penn
Inform
TADS
WordNet
Aargh
Poetry on the Road
2 RESPONSES TO “PROGRAMMING FROM A TO Z”
	1.	Greg Says: 
January 5th, 2006 at 8:37 am e
	2.	I’m an APCS teacher in high school and I’m really interested in this text. How accessible do you think it would be for an advanced high school student? I cover binary trees and we do some basic dictionary problems but I’d love to give some more difficult work to my brightest students. At what level is the text written? How many of the techniques you describe have you applied to your own book? 
	3.	Thanks!!
	4.	Greg
	5.	Daniel Says: 
January 16th, 2006 at 12:02 am e
	6.	The material isn’t going into a book, it’s just a set of tutorials I’m posting for my course at ITP. Feel free to follow along, new lessons will be posted each week!
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Hmmm, I could put a footer here. . .