Scrapism

(draft syllabus)

Instructor: Sam Lavigne | [email protected]
Teaching Assistant: TBD
Track: Code Poetry, Fall 2018
Location: School for Poetic Computation | 155 Bank St, New York, NY 10014
Time: Tuesdays 10am to 1pm
Office Hours: Tuesdays 2pm to 4pm (or by appointment)
Class Notes: link

Scrapism is the artistic practice of web scraping, or of automatically collecting and transforming found digital material. It hinges upon a combination of curatorial practice, reverse engineering, and hoarding mentality. In this class students will learn how to scrape massive quantities of material from the internet with Python, and then use that material to make poetic, satirical, critical, political projects. Each session we will cover a different web scraping technique, with production assignments relating to text, image and video. We will explore surrealist, dadaist, situationist techniques such as detournement, collage, and cut-ups, and apply them to a contemporary digital context.

Schedule

1. September 18th

Introductions. Using the terminal. Basic python. Reading lines.

Readings

• Intro to the command line
• Python basics
• Artificial Hells (introduction and chapter 1) By Claire Bishop
• A User’s Guide to Détournement

Assignment

• Find three sentences (or phrases) in the wild. Your sentences could come from the internet or the real world, from a book, a store sign, a facebook post, a news article, product packaging, or from a restaurant menu. Anything is fine, but you must not write it yourself. Be prepared to recite what you have found next week in class.

2. September 25th

Python part 2. Manipulating text. Automating writing.

Readings

• Tech reading 2 TBD
• The Cut Up Method by William Burroughs

Assignment

• Transform a non-poetic text into a poetic text using Python. It is up to you to determine how and why a text is poetic or non-poetic. If you are stuck, try techniques like sorting, randomizing, filtering, deleting, or replacing.

3. October 2nd

Web scraping basics. Making big lists.

Readings

• Tech reading 3
• Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith

4. October 9th

Web scraping part 2. APIs. Advanced text manipulation and parsing.

Readings

• Tech reading 4
• Digital Divide by Claire Bishop
• Montage by Jared Leibowich

5. October 16th

Automating collage.

Readings

• Tech reading 5
• Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead? by Hito Steyerl

6. October 23rd

Automating video.

Readings

• Tech reading 6
• Surrealism: the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia by Walter Benjamin

7. October 30th

Bots and project work.

Fun/useful Python Libraries

• moviepy - edit video
• vidpy - edit video (my library)
• videogrep - make supercuts (my library)
• youtube-dl - download videos
• pillow - edit images
• flask - web server
• twython - use the twitter api
• spacy - natural language processing
• requests - easy http requests
• envelopes - send email
• opencv - computer vision
• asciimatics - text-based interfaces and animation
• colorama - easy color in the terminal