A Meme Generator Genre Study

The genre study: Choose a genre or form of writing. This can be anything from a literary genre to a meme format. Gather a small number of exemplars of the genre and make a list of the characteristics that are common to all of them. Write a program that produces texts that emulate a particular form or genre of language.

A simple setup: “It’s like but for !” There’s a whole set of tech memes about startups, where all of them are “Uber but for X”. This is a good example of (surprisingly not satire) companies and services that are based on this model. Here’s a Buzzfeed Article on the same thing. Examples: - It’s Uber, but for food. - It’s Uber, but for books. - It’s Google, but for jobs. - It’s LinkedIn, but for dates. Pretty straightforward! So here’s a quick run of this: The “things” are random, pulled from the top of my head.

It’s not bad, but I wanted to be able to source my “things” from a database, not just manually thought of and written. Somewhere in the long list of tutorials was a link to the Corpora Project, and subsequently the pycorpora port.

Now, I did try this late at night, so perhaps that has something to do with my inability to make this work. At first, I installed pycorpora via pip, but that install does not include any data by default.

I re-installed defining the Corpora database. This gave me access to the categories I expected, but when trying to actually access words, I had a lot of issues.

I’ll have to take another look at this, perhaps locally first (rather than through Jupyter).

The Jupyter Notebook is available here.