Haikupedia

Haikupedia employs several "deformance machines" to transform Wikipedia into haiku. This radical contrast between form and content explores the use of hyper-condensed poetic form as a mode of "distant reading", and how genre expectations in haiku can be leveraged in machine translation to produce new works and modes of reading. One strictly formal deformance operation shapes sentences into a 5-7-5 haiku syllabic form ("An atom can be / ionized by removing one / of its electrons"); another loosens the 5-7-5 form (following Higginson) and imposes a phrase/fragment constraint (following Reichhold), implicitly enacting juxtaposition ("the couple / quickly fell in love / electrical signals"). In subsequent iterations, article text becomes "genetic material" in a genetic algorithm which uses convolutional neural networks and the Universal Sentence Encoder as parts of a complex fitness function.