Automated Fairy Tales
Would you like to read a fairytale?
What about a blog of automatically generated fairytales, based on Vladimir Propp’s classifications of folktale morphology?
Michael Paulukonis took his 2014 NaNoGenMo project, the Poorly Applied and Misunderstood Proppian Narratological Generator and hooked it up to a Tumblr blog.
The result recognizably follows the form of the folktales—and some of the turns of language—though reading them in bulk quickly reveals the seams.
The github repository for the original project is of interest to anyone wanting to make a fairytale generator, because Michael tends to thoroughly document his influence and prior sources, and this project is no exception. There’s links to code resources, indexes of motifs, online fairytales, research about semantic networks, previous fairytale generators, and links to further research.
Michael remains interested in fairytales and generation, as his 2015 project The Programmer Who Had No Heart in His Body demonstrates.