Article Dans Une Revue Digital Humanities Quarterly Année : 2024

Exploring Combinatorial Methods to Produce Sonnets: An Overview of the Oupoco Project

Résumé

In this paper, we describe Oupoco (l'Ouvroir de Poésie Combinatoire), a system producing new sonnets by recombining lines of poetry from existing sonnets, following an idea that Queneau described in his book Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, 1961). We first give the rationale of the project and review past experiments in poetry generation using combinatorial methods. We then demonstrate different outputs of our implementation (a Web site, a Twitter bot and a specifically developed device, called the Boîte à poésie) based on a corpus of 19th century French poetry. We describe how this project was an opportunity to work with artists and reach a new audience through the Boîte à poésie, and also through a video clip that frequently served as an introduction to the project. Our goal is to revive people's interest in poetry by giving access to automatically produced sonnets through original and entertaining channels and devices.
Introduction: Combinatorial Literature, from Queneau to Oupoco

The Oupoco project is a project exploring combinatorial methods to produce poetry by recombining existing lines of poetry. The starting point of the project was the book by Raymond Queneau, Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, in English) [Queneau 1961]. This book is composed of ten sonnets, each line being printed on a separate strip of paper (Figure 1), allowing the reader, by freely combining the different lines, to potentially produce and read a hundred thousand billion different sonnets. This combinatorial approach (the main characteristic of the book) encourages the reader to play with the meanings of the lines, with the various language registers, or simply to have fun with the book. It is this stimulating relationship between poetry and constraints that we wanted to reproduce and that was the mainspring of our project.

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hal-04855286 , version 1 (24-12-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04855286 , version 1

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Frédérique Mélanie-Becquet, Clément Plancq, Claude Grunspan, Mylène Maignant, Matthieu Raffard, et al.. Exploring Combinatorial Methods to Produce Sonnets: An Overview of the Oupoco Project. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2024, 18 (1). ⟨hal-04855286⟩
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