Sonali Prasad of the Poynter Institute writes about how a computer algorithm is creating haikus out of Financial Times stories.
Prasad writes, “Chris Gathercole, head of FT Labs at the Financial Times, was learning a new coding language, GoLang, when an idea struck him: Why not create poetry out of news stories?
“He developed a program that parses an article for text and pieces together fragments that can be hand-picked to form a Haiku, an ancient form of Japanese poetry. Haikus follow a set pattern — typically a three-line observation with 17 syllables arranged in a 5-7-5 pattern.
“The ‘accidental’ poems are now published in the FT as part of a column called Hidden Haiku.
“‘I love that these snippets are just sitting in plain sight but unrecognized in the FT articles,’ Gathercole told Poynter in a video call. ‘You can tell when a journalist has written a piece and really enjoyed the words.'”
Read more here.
