Cut a story within a story computationally, a la Tree of Codes and One Thousand and One Nights
Only a few people noticed the peculiar characteristics of that district: the fatal lack of color, as if that shoddy, quickly-growing area could not afford the luxury of it. Everything was gray there, as in black-and-white photographs or in cheap catalogues**. This** similarity was real rather than metaphorical because at times, when wandering in those parts, one in fact gained the impression that one was turning the pages of a prospectus, looking at columns of boring commercial advertisement, amongwhich suspect announcements nestled like parasites, together with dubious notices and illustrations with a double meaning.
The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz >>
Polish to English by Celina Wieniewska >>
Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer
Only a few people noticed the lack of color, as in black-and-white photographs. This was real rather than mataphorical— colorless sky, an enormous geometry of emptiness, a watery anonymous gray which did not throw shadows and did not stress anything, a screen placed to hide the true meaning of things, a facae behind which there was an overintense coloring, exhausted by passitivity.
Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer
Within the tradition of story within a story, Foer takes this one step further by literally constructing a new story by cutting out words from another. While it could be debated whether the result is a work of prose, poetry, or even sculpture, it could also be thought of as one of computation, a special functor designed for a text that itself was created as an act of translation.
A bit naively we can think of this process in functional code as the composition of a map (translation) and a filter (cutting):
polish_to_english_wieniewska = map(text)
tree_of_codes = filter(cut_indices)
result = compose(tree_of_codes, polish_to_english_wieniewska)(the_street_of_crocodiles)
We are creating a web tool that would allow authors to easily craft their own tree_of_codes function and visualize it in a similar, but digital form.
A Redux/React app that takes a source text and enables, helps, prods the user to cut out their own story.
> npm install
> npm run build // or `npm run watch`
> npm start
Server running got to http://localhost:10001
// Mori data structures? Or immutable.js
#{
// A vector of the source text tokenized by word and punctuation
"src" #[String],
// A vector of the same length of the src text
// Defaults to true for all indicies
// True means include token and vice versa
// The main application state can be determined by zipping the `src` and `gen`
"gen" #[Bool],
// Create a char Trie of the src text for efficient autocomplete
// Each word will be a set of indicies it's contained at
"srcTrie" Char -> Set(Int) // need to choose an implementation
}