I’m interested in assembling a team for HackPR 2015 (Sept. 19-20) to create the Hostos Bot 2.0 – a software robot that uses the writings of Eugenio María de Hostos to generate new texts and publish them in social media.
Last semester, my Digital Humanities Internship course created Hostos Bot 1.0, a program that draws from a corpus of 16 books written by Eugenio María de Hostos to generate new (and absurd) texts, which are published every 6 hours in social media networks (Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook). This bot was a collaborative effort: under my direction, the DH Internship students prepared the textual corpora, and Anderson Román wrote the program (using Node.js) to generate the texts and publish them to Tumblr.
Here are some features I’m interested in developing for Hostos Bot 2.0:
- Develop the ability to post directly to Twitter and Facebook, instead of via Tumblr.
- Develop interactivity via Twitter, so the bot replies to those who wish to address it.
- To have the bot comment on trending topics in Puerto Rico, by drawing on newspaper headline feeds and selecting language from it to seed its Markov Chain text generator.
I need 2-3 students who can work with Node.js (or can port it to another scripting language), can work with the Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr APIs, and can set this up as an autonomous hosted bot. I can provide guidance and resources for the project.
This bot will be presented at international electronic literature conferences and at the Magna Feria del Libro Eugenio María de Hostos.
If you’re interested and available for the hackathon, please e-mail me at leonardo.flores@upr.edu.