Diversion At Hyperspeed

How many steps are there from Corpus Linguistics to homemade furniture? I should be reading for my exam tomorrow, and I'm even trying to, but it's ever so easy to do one click too many, and then you're lost in cyberspace.

I started off quite alright with the web-based compendium, and began to read about different ways of presenting and adapting text that are digitalized on a symbolic level.

• The text can be displayed in different fonts and colors.
• Elements of texts can be linked to other texts or parts of texts (hyperlinks).
• Specific parts of the text (e.g. footnotes, hyperlinks) can be either visible or hidden.
• The text can be translated to another language.
• A summary of the text can be made (e.g. "SweSum")
• We can extract keywords etc. and find structures and relations within the text itself and with other texts.
• We can generate a text from a database, previous texts or other information. (e.g. "SciGen", "PoMo")
• We can create statistics over words and other textual characteristics (e.g. "Ord i dag")

Deliberately I chose not to keep the links from the original, otherwise you might get lost too, but the one that set me off was PoMo, a text generator that delivers nonsense academic papers. Quote from the creator: "The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator [...] using a system for generating random text from recursive grammars."

So, what did I find on PoMo, besides the fact that I absolutely love "silly" things like that? (And the fact that it's not silly, considering that actually a few generated papers like these have been accepted as real. That opens up for a series of important questions, I believe.) What I found else was a "Sites I Like" link list on the right, and from there I jumped to MAKE: Blog - hilarious! One of the posts drew my attention, and I clicked again. Then I decided to blog about it myself, after all, that's what's is all about, isn't it? Diversion At Hyperspeed ...