Lee Worden's Cutup Engine 2.0

LEE WORDEN'S CUTUP ENGINE 2.0
http://vispo.com/cgi-bin/wonder/cutup/cutup.cgi

Some will recall the Cutup Engine Lee Worden had up on the Net for several
years. You cut and paste text into it or feed it one or more URLs, and it
dices the text nice. William S. Burroughs said that when you cut audio tape,
the future leaks out. The Cutup Engine provides an unexpected view through
the interzones of texts. Data structures, however dimensional, are
expressable as strings.

It's great to have this wordenful, creative tool back on the Net after an
absence of a couple of years. Lee Worden has re-written it and added a few
features.

You can adjust the "chunk size". The cutup code splits the source texts into
words (html tags are treated as one word). It constructs the cutup text, by
default, by pulling chunks of 3 to 7 words from the source texts and adding
on chunks until the total, by default, is at least 1,000 words.

The total length of the cutup is adjustable from 1,000 to 10,000 words.

Cutups are stored on the server for 30 days. They aren't moved to the public
archive unless you visit the piece at least a day later. In that case,
they're scheduled for being moved to the permanent archive, which is
browsable. Copy the URLs of cutups you want to submit to the permanent
archive and visit them a day later. That'll do it.

Lee has also implented an interesting feature that makes the Cutup Engine
part of your browser. You bookmark the link described at
http://vispo.com/wonder/cutup/about.htm . From then on, you can click the
bookmark to cut up whatever page your browser is currently displaying.

You can also check out the Perl source code.

Lee Worden is a mathematician who investigates systems. More about Lee at
http://two.ucdavis.edu/~worden/pub/cv.pdf .

ja

ps: He has also written something about cutups that is part of a stir fry
piece at http://vispo.com/StirFryTexts/4.html