TweetExquis.Alphoenix.net - A Twitter Experiment

I have just read the number of Twitter’s growth from the last month and it is frankly astonishing. I wonder if the people who created it ever wondered it could have such an impact and modify the way we interact so profoundly – I also just read an article that proclaimed that Twitter destroys “morality” by maiming the way people access information and process it. Twitter is drawing so much attention that we will have an interesting time seeing how it will evolve, and which new apps are added to the existing repertoire.

This particular one is quite peculiar, and that is why I decided to cover it today. Essentially, it takes different tweets and mixes certain parts of them in order to create a new sentence. The title of the app comes from an expression coined by French surrealists that goes by the name of “Cadavre Exquis”. It follows in the footsteps of Oulipo (another French concept), a “workshop of potential literature” founded in 1960 that aimed to employ constrained writing techniques to generate works of their own. These writing techniques include palindromes, lipograms and a mathematical approach to some aspects of the writing process.

This is not an app that would appeal to anybody. It won’t even appeal to the majority of Twitter users. It will, however, highly appeal to those who are studying the nuances of the micro-blogging phenomenon, its significance from the point of view of linguistics and its eventual ramifications.

“In the Twitter galaxy exists a wonderful tool, it's Twitter search tool. This tool allows the user to see in real-time the lasts tweets with the requested word. Thanks to that, I've imagined, following the steps of the Oulipo a simple application. Using the datas from Twitter as a sentence generator, I create a new sentence around that word. It's the magic of randomization!”

It is a peculiar application. It might let us study the way people structure tweets and see if we spot any recurrent patterns or trends.

Where can I read more about Oulipo? Is there an official site?