Any programmers care to answer some questions from a newbie?

[beatniks3]

Hello. I am what you would call a hardware-only kind of computer guy. I need some general guidance with a program I want to design. I am an English Major writing a senior thesis on the Cut-up method of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. In summary, this was an artistic method that they started to work with in 1959 that took the montage of painting and applied it to text. They randomly cut-up text from a variety of sources and combined these fragments back together by chance. Burroughs believed that the cut-up method liberated the WORD from all its pre-defined, and thus, controlling uses. Anyways, I would be happy to answer anyone?s questions, just post them or send along a PM. I want to design a program that will take a certain amount of text (be it a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole book) and rearrange this text based on some kind of system of perimeters and do two things with this data: display it in a window on the screen and save it to the harddrive for eventual cd-r back-up. I say I want a system of parameters because I want there to be many possible ways to manipulate and show the text. My little experience with Java Programming has taught me that as text is stored as a numerical variable, this shouldn?t be very hard (in theory) to do. Where should I start? Is this something that I should try and do myself or should/could I find someone to do this for me? Thanks for reading and please post whatever comes to mind!

 

[CSoup]

What are the parameters?

 

[EagleKeeper]

Some type of random position generator based on the parameters.

Without more information, it is difficult to recommend/guid/assist you in your quest for greatness.

 

[beatniks3]

thanks guys for the posts, and thanks csoup for the PM. I will draft up some of the parameters that I was thinking of having and post back with this info.

 

[beatniks3]

o.k. been a while since I posted in this thread. Maybe the bump will generate more interest in this topic. So after thinking about what I need done (in terms of programming), I think maybe the right word to use would be permutation. Could someone make an easy program that produces all possible purmutations of an input text file? For example: The text file "THE DOG IS BLACK" would return
BLACK IS DOG THE
THE BLACK DOG IS
IS THE BLACK DOG
THE IS DOG BLACK, etc. The artist Gysin that I mentioned earlier experimented with doing this back in the day with the ancient computers. Now to extend this idea, would it be possible to do the same thing except instead of using single words, you used whole sentences? For example: The text file with 4 sentences (1,2,3,4) would return
1234
2341
3412
4123, etc. Would it be possible to make the program do the same thing with paragraphs? For example: The text file with 3 paragraphs (1,2,3) would return
123
231
321, etc.

Please help! No contribution will go unwasted! thanks, beatniks3

 

[Adrian Tung]

Once you get the concept and math done right with numbers, you can easily do it with words, sentences or paragraphs. All you need to do is to associate the word/sentence/paragraph with a number (storing them in a static/ array/dynamic array/linked list would be one way of doing it), and run your algorithm on the numbers instead.


Hope that helps,
atwl

 

[TangDN]

take the input as a string. con-catenate(? not sure if right word/spelling) it by white spaces for individual words, tabs for paragraphs, and periods/question marks etc.. for sentences.

take each piece store it as an array index or a linked list node. find a permutation creating algorithm and use that to display your permutations to the screen.

 

[beatniks3]

thanks for the replies! I understand what you all have suggested but I don't really have the real-world experience to just sit down and do it...would it be possible to take the source code from here and change/alter it to fit my needs? (remembering that what I want is all permutations (either by word, by sentence, or by paragraph). What software would I need to do this? I am trying to do this TODAY so if anyone has any advice, feel free to PM me or reply here...thanks...