Material of Language

Notes and notebooks for Material of Language.

If you want to play around with the notebooks or can't get the dependencies working on your machines, the repository is available on Binder. Everything should work there, just make sure to download your modified notebooks and output to your own computer when you're done.

Please note that many of these notebooks do not display correctly in GitHub's preview for some reason. (In particular, the "Concrete compositions" and "Letters as numbers" notebooks are significantly truncated.) Please download these and view them locally!

Python intro notebooks:

• Letters as numbers: How text is represented (Unicode and other encodings)
• Interpolating strings: Strategies for putting string together in Python

Concrete composition:

• Re-creating R. L. Draper's "top spin" with for loops and custom ranges
• Concrete compositions in HTML: CSS absolute positioning and Python to create procedural layouts

Asemic writing with procedural geometry:

• Asemic writing with Flat: Basic Flat tutorial plus some simple generative techniques for producing asemic writing; Bezmerizing in use
• Lines and asemic writing: Another take on using polylines, Catmull-Rom splines and Flat to make asemic characters
• Handwriting remix: Loading and manipulating data from the Char74K dataset
• K-means glyphs: Using K-means clustering to generate evenly-spaced random points (and then use those points to make asemic glyphs)

Fonts as data:

• Manipulating font data: Introduction to font files and how to do stuff with them
• Quick Hershey text: Loading and displaying Hershey font data as paths with Flat

Letterforms and machine learning (Colab notebooks):

• Sampling from Google's SVG VAE
• Training DCGAN on glyph images: part 1, part 2

Interactivity and animation:

• Flat with interactive widgets
• Creating animations with Flat and ffmpeg

Deployment:

• Standalone scripts and web apps with Glitch