Reading Writing Electronic Text - Final

06 May 2016
courses, documentation, rwet

Concept

My final project for Reading Writing Electronic Text uses Markov chains to generate new trucker CB slang. To put some structure around this new slang, I created a mad lib using the timeless trucker song, "Convoy" by CW McCall. For good measure, I threw in some American Revolutionary War terms into the initial corpus of CB lingo.

The original "Convoy" go like this:

And the mad lib formula I used looks like this:

Add a little magick, the end result looks like

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Process

I began by gathering a corpus of terms and definitions of CB slang from various pages around the web. My initial idea was to just focus on CB slang, but I realized these phrases already make no sense to the average person, so running them through a Markov chain to generate even more nonsensical phrases would create an output that would be utterly lost on the reader.

I needed to spice up the corpus in some way, and after trying out a few different ideas for mashups (lyrics from popular songs, TV shows, etc), I settled on terms from the American Revolution. The two seem to pair together well - both have a "don't tread on me"/tea party vibe; maybe there's a commentary on the declining American working class; and I'm told there was some sort of connection between truckers and the U.S. bicentennial in 1976.

To get the mad lib to work, I separated the the corpus into different lists - ones for rigs, places, CB greetings, events, things, people, cops, driving/speed, facts.

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The Code

The code is at https://gist.github.com/coblezc/beebac421898d24e714e532271508880

I created text files for both terms and definitions for each of these different lists. I ran each of those through a Markov generator and then combined them into dictionaries for each list. For example, I would run places-terms.txt and places-definitions.txt through the Markov generator, and then combine the two outputs into a dictionary of places.

After creating the structure for the Convoy mad lib, the program would pick a random term to fill in each blank. I also saved the definitions of each term in a glossary to be printed underneath the generated song lyrics.

Here's what the full output looks like:

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  • Email: coblezc@gmail.com
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