Geopoetry: Designing location-based combinatorial electronic literature soundtracks for roadtrips

Abstract

In this paper we present GeoPoetry, a location-based work of electronic literature that generates poetic language and dynamic soundtracks for roadtrips that reflect the mood of people in the surrounding area. GeoPoetry takes recent nearby geotagged Twitter data and generates strings of combinatorial poetry from them using simple Markov-chain text generation. It also performs a sentiment analysis on the local Twitter traffic, which it uses to seed a playlist on Spotify, using a simple model of affect. The result is a sonic reflection of the social geography traversed by the user that responds to its situatedness in both space and time. GeoPoetry participates in a long tradition of public and locative artwork which has the potential to inspire exciting new works of interactive narrative.