HUMAN.DOC

[moonmilk]

In Tom Phillips' A Humument (1973), he took an obscure Victorian Novel, A Human Document, and painted and collaged over the pages to make a new book. In that spirit, I downloaded scans of A Human Document from archive.org, and ran an OCR program to identify the positions of all the words. And now I'm going to do... something... with it.

I've been planning this since NaNoGenMo 2015, but never had time to do anything. Will I get anywhere in the one week left of November? Stay tuned!

[moonmilk]

Progress! The basic underlying structure kinda works! Now I have to figure out what I want to do with it.

[moonmilk]

Quick synesthesia test

[moonmilk]

for https://oulipo.social

[moonmilk]

I haven't had time to do the full HUMAN.DOC experience I wanted, so I'll return to it later. Meanwhile, here is

A HUMAN DOCUM•NT

A NOV•L

•xpurgat•d for oulipo.social

[moonmilk]

Here's a sample page. The rest are uploading. I swear it's "done" before the "deadline"!

[moonmilk]

code is here: https://github.com/moonmilk/nanogenmo2017

[moonmilk]

While I try to figure out how to get a nice book viewer running on archive.org, you can browse the output files here: http://pentametron.com/a_human_docum_nt/ or use a simple book-reading interface here: http://pentametron.com/a_human_docum_nt/

[moonmilk]

I couldn't resist making a video trailer for the thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKq9d2IgPvw

[moonmilk]

And here at last is the book on archive.org!

https://archive.org/details/a-human-docum-nt

[moonmilk]

Funny side-effect: when I uploaded the book to archive.org, their systems automatically tried to read it, leading to results like this:

A HUMAN DOCUlJliNT.  37 
“ Haft* you, darling ? ” ®|>1®1 tl® otl®r. 
“ It’s a pity you’® just too la®. Ho®HRr, 
at all •’•hits, you can®njoy a good long look 
at him. Don’t you ®R? Tl®y’® coming to 
this carria^R” ```

[hugovk]

Great, have a green label!