Well, it’s Christmas so I’m taking on stupid self invented programming projects, much like last year with Selenabot. This year I’ve decided I’m going to create a Markov Text generator that recreates the work of a Young Kadhim Shubber (YKS).
I’ve decided to scrape all Kadhim’s work on Felix that’s available in non-PDF form (for now… if this becomes very easy perhaps I’ll try and automate PDF reading so we can even get his frozen hot-takes on world politics from 2008).
First order of the day is making a markov text parser and generator that work in python3. I forked an old python2 code I found on github into Markov_text3, which is a python3 module for generating Markov chains of text from a given source (saved as a .txt file).
Now we have Markov_text3, I need to get the source material. Having a quick look at Kadhim’s page on Felix (http://felixonline.co.uk/authors/ks607/) he has around 140 articles online, although not all of them published under his name are written by him (he used to be editor and thus I guess uploaded other people’s stuff). It appears to be material from pages 6 & 7 (his later work) so I’ll scrape that material manually.
Mid-Jan Update: I got busy over the xmas holidays and this project fell by the wayside, the main problem was that I have completely forgotten how to use Beautiful Soup properly and thus couldn’t easily get a list of all the articles that Kadhim had written. This was stupid because I managed to get a Markov Generating script going quite nicely.
https://gist.github.com/mattallinson/844684a66fd99f857b0edb2564c32d8e