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Times Haikus

haiku.nytimes.com

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Re: Times Haikus

#3

Post by simonsarris »

Oh my I adore this.

    His deadly prose is
    so authentic that it has
    a life of its own.
    
    But ordering street
    food and riding the subway
    had become old hat.
    
    "As an engineer,
    I'm sort of a student of
    how things fall apart."
I love short stories, and I firmly believe that one of the secrets to good storytelling is to be compact in emotion (let it expand in the reader's head) and start as close to the end as possible.

These haikus are the perfect amount of prose to package up NYT stories.

Re: Times Haikus

#5

Post by amouat »

simonsarris wrote: post #3

Oh my I adore this. His deadly prose is so authentic that it has a life of its own. But ordering street food and riding the subway had become old hat. "As an engineer, I'm sort of a student of how things fall apart." I love short stories, and I firmly believe that one of the secrets to good storytelling is to be compact in emotion (let it expand in the reader's head) and start as close to the end as possible. These h…

Isn't it just automatically extracting sentences that can be broken into 5, 7, 5 groups of syllables? I don't think anyone has made any attempt to summarise the article.

Very interesting though.

Re: Times Haikus

#9

Post by jetti »

amouat wrote: post #5
simonsarris wrote: post #3

Oh my I adore this. His deadly prose is so authentic that it has a life of its own. But ordering street food and riding the subway had become old hat. "As an engineer, I'm sort of a student of how things fall apart." I love short stories, and I firmly believe that one of the secrets to good storytelling is to be compact in emotion (let it expand in the reader's head) and start as close to the end as possible. These h…

Isn't it just automatically extracting sentences that can be broken into 5, 7, 5 groups of syllables? I don't think anyone has made any attempt to summarise the article. Very interesting though.

The process is described in the about section (http://haiku.nytimes.com/about). There is an algorithm that extracts the haikus but they only make it to the website when a journalist thinks it good:

"The algorithm discards some potential poems if they are awkwardly constructed and it does not scan articles covering sensitive topics. Furthermore, the machine has no aesthetic sense. It can't distinguish between an elegant verse and a plodding one. But, when it does stumble across something beautiful or funny or just a gem of a haiku, human journalists select it and post it on this blog."

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