Anovelmous

Anonymous + Novel. Write together as a community to create a collective narrative.

Concept

• Strangers create a narrative, word-by-word

• Every 10 seconds, contributors vote with an allowed vocabulary for the next word

• Grammar checker enforces readability

Constraints create interesting and creative situations.

Constraints are a way to game-ify some aspect of communication.

• Messages... with 140 character limits = Twitter
• Photos... purposefully, permanently deleted = Snapchat
• Videos... limited to 7 seconds = Vine
• Novels.. one word at a time, together = Anovelmous

Prewriting

Good literature needs prior thought.

It also needs characters, places, and plot items.

Before we start a novel, we need to do the following:

1. Figure out a vague back-of-book summary
2. Craft some characters, places, and plot items
3. (Proto) Name it

These steps will happen in sequence, each after a certain amount of time to allow for reddit-style voting to occur on contributions.

The word-by-word contribution will begin once the prewriting rounds are completed.

So how does it play. Tell me.

Every 10 seconds, a voting round ends. During each round, an author may cast a vote for the next word in the novel. However, the author has a limited pool of words, to be expanded by the top contributors. If the author's votes are consistently being selected for the novel, he/she will be able to add new words to the vocabulary.

Development

Make sure you have a clean virtualenv.

Install the necessary dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

Set up any necessary development environment variables or configure them in a hidden file like .env

For example: (this app uses postgres)

export DATABASE_URL="postgres://<user>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<database_name>"
export CORS_WHITELIST="localhost:<other_port_num>,localhost:<again>"
export DJANGO_DEBUG=True

Now, it's just typical django application setup:

python manage.py migrate

If you don't have nltk data on your local machine already:

python -c "import nltk; nltk.download()"

Create a superuser

python manage.py createsuperuser

Finally, run a one-off command to populate the db with fixture data.

python manage.py loaddata datadump.json

You should now be able to run the app locally for testing and development!

python manage.py runserver

If you think you've added any great fixture data, make sure to update the fixture data file: datadump.json

python manage.py dumpdata api --output=api/fixtures/datadump.json

NLTK Issues

You may not have NLTK data installed on your system. If this is the case, follow the procedure described on their website in order to download the necessary corpora.

(This app is currently only using the brown corpora, but plans to expand to more in the future.)