README.md

Cure Product

This repository contains files used to generate material for the BACK UP sections of the book of poems, CURE PRODUCT. It's also here to document the basic process I followed, though I ended up at this process only after a lot of experimentation.

Basic Process

1. I ran count_occurences.py on source.txt to create source_occurences_words.txt, which contains a dictionary counting the occurence of each unique word in source.txt.

2. I converted the dictionary in source_occurences_words.txt into a list of unique words without their counts and saved it as source_unique_words.py.

   Note: Although this file now matches the words in source_occurences_words.txt, when I used it in step 3, I stripped away words that occurred more than something like 100 times. I can't remember exactly.

3. I ran regex_couplets.py on source.txt.

   Essentially, this script iterated through each unique combination of words in source_unique_words.py ("A" and "above", then "A" and "accounting", etc.), using a regular expression search to identify lines containing these sequence of characters (as words or a parts of words) and writing those lines to a new file in the /regex_couplets directory. Given the many unique combinations of words in source_unique_words.py, this process took awhile.

4. I ran remove_files_by_line_count.py to remove any files generated in step 3 with less than a few couplets.

5. I ran random_select_regex_couplets.py to randomly select files from /regex_couplets and write them to a new file in /random_select_regex_couplets.

   I decided to do random selection because, though step 4 reduced the total file count significantly, the remaining total was still way too high to review manually (I tried for a while).

6. I read through the resulting random selection and further selected "poems" for inclusion in CURE PRODUCT.

   I didn't use these verbatim. Rather, I gave myself some basic guidelines, again, coming to these after a lot of experimentation. Per poem:

   • Any first line of a couplet could be exchanged with any other first line of a couplet. Same for second lines.
   • Any line could be left out.

7. I repeated steps 5 and 6 many times.

In addition to the above, I came up with a few poems in the BACK UP sections using the regex_pattern.py script, which I manually edited to specify the words, parts of words, or text patterns to look for. For example, the poem ^without, ^without was the result of a regular expression search for lines beginning with the word "without", and the poem m$, n$, n$, m$ was the result of a regular expression search for lines ending with those letters.