User:Laurier Rochon/work/tragicnine

Tragic Nine

The gist of it

• You subscribe to the Tragic Nine show (it's a soap opera newsletter)
• I use a computer script to gather tragic news from around the world, extract the stories from it and transform it into a soap opera narrative.
• Nine lines are sent to you by email just in time for your morning coffee
• The next day, I use the last section of of the previous episode as the search criterion to gather news stories, and do the same. You are sent the next episode just in time for your morning coffee.
• Same next day, and all other ones after.
• You are absolutely hooked.

Proof of concept

This test was done using actual scraping - the text needs massaging, yes.

DAY I (email 1)

Winnie : This was not some media event for me.

Winnie : I have unfinished business he thought.

Jules : His uncle said Steven was active in Boy Scouts, and that his Eagle Scout rank was awarded at his funeral.

Winnie : He was described as an active outdoorsman with a gruff demeanor — and a soft heart for children.

Winnie : Personal directness is the heart of Reich's music and influence.

Winnie : Since the early '70s, Reich's musical influence has been undeniable.

Mandy : Those minimalist repititions, subtle counterpoints and mesmerizing harmonies that course through the music of artists from Adams to Pat Metheny, Brian Eno to Radiohead, spring from Reich's pioneering works.

Jules : Reich pioneered a new minimalist sound in American music by writing simple patterns.

Mandy : Played on percussion, or keyboards, the repetitious patterns gradually changed, like the sound of a stream, weaving a spell over listeners.

<More of the drama tomorrow...>

DAY II (email 2)

<In the previous episode : Played on percussion, or keyboards, the repetitious patterns gradually changed, like the sound of a stream, weaving a spell over listeners>

Winnie : The few personal items discovered were sniffed out by specially trained dogs, which is what prompted the Griffith family to focus on fundraising for a dog.

Jules : COUSHATTA — The disappearance of a family member or loved one is one of the most difficult situations that any person can face.

Winnie : If the most common diagnosis made of her illness was on the money – anti-social personality disorder with borderline traits, an unlovable combination – it meant Ms.

Winnie : Ms?

Winnie : Youth Centre and began getting her first regular doses of TQ, Ms.

The friends go on the porch and Winnie sighs, looking at the other two.

Winnie : One guard, one of those on duty at Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institution the morning she died, estimates he himself had at least 30 or 40 times cut ligatures from Ms.

Winnie : Times?

Mandy : What was going on in the world at that time? Reich asked rhetorically.

<More of the drama tomorrow...>

DAY III (email 3)

<In the previous episode : What was going on in the world at that time? Reich asked rhetorically.>

Jules : The next day is the last day of work for the rest of the house, and that night they get ready for Danny’s BBQ.

Jules : This seems to do the trick, and they head home to get ready for their last night out on the shore.

Jules : Once everyone heads home, Vinny is still ticked off at Deena for putting the damper on his booty call for the night.

Mandy : Deena still isn’t cool with the thought of her friend hooking up with Vinny and puts her foot down that it can’t happen.

Jules : While at the party, Vinny decides he likes Deena’s friend Lisa.

Jules : She is concerned about Snooki, since she knows she has feelings for Vinny and is also friends with Lisa, but Snooki insists she doesn’t care if they hook up.

Jules : She has been ok with him hooking up with whomever he wants all summer, but she gets called names when she doesn’t want him to hook up with her best friend? I understand exactly where she is coming from, and if anyone was acting like sourpuss Angelina it was Vinny because he didn’t get what (or I guess who) he wanted.

Winnie : He tells her she tells him she loves him a lot, but doesn’t act like it.

Winnie : In what can be considered the ultimate Jersey Shore insult, he tells her she’s acting like the infamous Angelina for being a party pooper.

...

Another way of seeing what it does

|               lots of information + boring             |
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           |           almost there           |
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                  CAPTIVATING SOAP OPERA
                      IN YOUR INBOX

Prologue

Working with the ideas of structure, plot, narrative and tragedy, I had the original intention to reenact an Ancient Greek Tragedy in the most traditional fashion. By splitting up the structure into very rigid prologue/acts/closure/etc subsections, world news would fill in the blanks and create a single story that would read semi-fluidly on the screen. The different stories would be jammed together one after the other, and then split up again according to the structure I had defined. It looked a little like this :

Prologue

“It is a comedy, and that must have a certain rhythm and energy. And I had to have that every day for eight weeks. That was really something. Yet while she looks exquisite — easily a dozen years younger — she also looks like a woman who truly loves life, and a woman who has fully lived. “But by the time I was a young girl, my mother was not working, and my father was mostly doing dubbing work,” she said. “We had no real connection to cinema. “It all happened by accident. And then someone asked me to do something else, and then Jacques Demy saw me.

Parados

And it began. “Acting was not just doing a film, but being involved in another world. Instead of just dreaming about what it might like to be someone else, it was being able to really fly away and into another character, and experiencing emotions you might not be able to.

Episodes

Act 1

“I had seen his first film of course, ‘Knife in the Water,’ which was very good. The Society is now beginning a Spring Mini-Season at the Curzon Cinema with seats available as usual for the general public and it is Bouchareb’s London River starring Brenda Blethyn which starts off the season on March 23. Both come to London in the wake of the 7/7 bombings concerned about their children – her daughter and his son – who might possibly have been caught up in the tragedy. Bouchareb’s aim is to find a message of hope in this context, but without sentimentality. Perfectly acted, this is a moving story with a positive message. In the end, and along the way, you’ll cheer for the underdogs, a group of talented but sadly forgotten musicians who make an unlikely comeback. It’s intelligent and politically savvy entertainment that, although filled with stereotypes and unlikely plots, emerges as a delight.

Act 2

He was unceremoniously fired 30 years ago when he insisted on hiring Jewish musicians during an anti-Semitic purge near the end of the Brezhnev era in Russia. Hiding it from the officials, he decides, with the help of a brazenly crooked manager, to get his old orchestra together and play the concert instead. The dowdy group of has-beens insists upon perks like traveling expenses and dinner at a first-class restaurant. The conductor’s wife, for example, makes a living by supplying “extras” for lackluster political rallies that don’t have enough bodies to look spontaneous. The cellist is a bear of a man who looks as if he might crush the cello. The drunken Gypsies and the loud Russians are straight out of stereotype-land, but, as it turns out, this is all the better to get laughs.

Act 3

Not since Robert Preston’s “think” method in “The Music Man” has a group of musicians been so unlikely to carry a tune. They acquire instruments and fake travel visas with so much ease that it stretches plausibility. The far-right National Front (FN) party set the stage for big political gains in last Sunday’s local elections. Half of France’s 2,023 cantons – the country’s smallest territorial units – were up for grabs, and the anti-immigration party led by Marine Le Pen won a place in the second round in 394 cantons, or a fifth of all contested councils. He was outside Hakim's bakery, handing out fliers to people buying dinnertime baguettes and having a drink with rugby enthusiasts at a local bar. By contrast, FN candidate Rémi Carillon, a virtual unknown who won almost 17% of votes in the first round, was nowhere to be seen. Bourgoin, a member of the Communist Party, obtained almost 60% of the votes in Gennevilliers, a city with a strong immigrant population and a long tradition of voting for the Communist ticket. Despite winning over half of all ballots, very high abstention rates in the first round forced Bourgoin into a run-off. However, many residents do express fear about the far right's surge in popularity.

Exodos

Resident Elsa Fausillon said she continues to be shocked by the FN's electoral progress. "People voted for the FN before, but would hide it," said Fausillon. "I hear more and more people admit that they vote for the National Front. "When they see the kids of Gennevilliers and Asnières beating each other up, they vote for the FN. While the death was an isolated tragedy, it is part of an ongoing rivalry between youths in two adjacent housing projects that straddle the border between Gennevilliers and the city of Asnières. But they are not convinced that the killing had much influence on the election. Late last year she compared Muslims praying in the public streets outside crowded mosques to the Nazi-era occupation.

This was somewhat interesting, but 2 main problems arose :

• The stitching of the texts together was arbitrary. They were just glued together, start to finish in the hopes of creating a cohesive, united story - but language doesn't work that way. Even though they were texts that got harvested from the same batch of links (generated from the same search query), there was lots of discrepancies in the different interpretations of the term.

• The delivery : shooting this to people right on the screen sucks. It doesn't bring much to the reader, it doesn't really get much across, and it's way too much text for anyone to be remotely interested in participating for that long.

I must point out that these 2 weaknesses were brilliantly worked out with the help of Michael and Aymeric respectively. Their advice went something along the lines of (Michael) : take context into account - and (Aymeric) make the project more self-critical.

The current building blocks

The tragedy, the soap opera

Turning newsworthy tragic events into a soap opera script it to me, a great way to undermine and criticize both news media and soap operas. Somehow the message behind the story gets through, but there is an evident reference to the 'playing out' of events. Soap operas usually ride the wave of tragic events, but are rarely to be taken seriously at all. They apparently have their own language, camera techniques, cutting mechanism and so on. In the way, the predictability of it all offers a nice platform to reflect upon the constructing and publishing of real news stories via the Internet.

And again, it's much about structure for me. The idea of the soap opera is to feed the audience bit by bit, and hopefully keep the suspense (or gossip) going for as long as possible. By stopping each episode right before a climatic moment, one hopes to hook the viewer and make them come back for the next. I would like to mirror this reasoning as I deliver the messages via email to subscribers - very quick to read, painless, effortless, brainless.

Hopefully there will be a strangeness, an uncanny feeling from the juxtaposition of the form and the remixed content. The very few experiences I've had watching these types of shows, I felt a very morbid vibe traversing me - some kind of paralyzing effect which I had trouble shaking off, even being done watching. There is a perpetual flatness, a numbing force that wraps quickly around you, and it feels difficult to untangle oneself from it. It feels like the simplicity gets under my skin, and slowly works its way into my brain. Hopefully I can leverage this textual apathy to create a stark contrast with the pressing issues raised by daily tragedies.

Worldwide news

New newsletter/subscription format

The algorithm

The new and improved mega-pipeline

• Google API news search : tragedy
• Harvest max 64 links
• Go one by one, crawl them
• Clean out the HTML, clean out the crap, clean out the links, etc.
• Merge all text, split into sentences. Order by length.
• For every single sentence, check all other sentences for the one which is closest to it (highest amount of similar words).
• Measure which chunk of text (9 lines) has the highest average density of similar text. This means going through every possible combination of 9 lines (keeping the order of course) and seeing which of them are most coherent together (statistically, anyways).
• Record these 9 lines, they are the next to be sent out.
• From those 9 lines, grab the last 3. Strip out verbs, stop words, non-alpha words, misspelled words (thank you Enchant module) - essentially just keep nouns.
• Check the frequency distribution to see what is most commonly used. For example, 'bridge' and 'Oakland' might be the 2 most popular terms from those 3 lines.
• Use "tragedy" + popular term from last 3 lines #1 + popular term from last 3 lines #2 (in this case, 'bridge' and 'Oakland'
• Google API news search : "tragedy+bridge+oakland"