If you’ve ever spent any time on YouTube, you’ve likely had the displeasure partaking in YouTube comments, a veritable haven for trolls and massacring the English language. But what if you took that fire hose of venom and found a way to make it into art? Comment Haiku does exactly that.
The project endeavors to “find poetry in the gutter” by taking comment strings and forcing them into haiku. Best of all? It’s open source so you can play too.
Comment Haiku is a tech experiment by a small team at W+K Portland. Our aim was to see if it’s possible to use code to convert YouTube comments (generally regarded as total illiterate drivel) into poetry. We feel like we got part of the way there. If you want to see under the hood and look at the code, it’s in two projects on github: haiku and django-haiku. All of the code is under the BSD license and we’d love more people to play.
You can see it in action on Nyan Cat, Honey Badger, Keyboard Cat, and Star Wars Kid, as well as any number of other popular videos.
For more information, visit Comment Haiku or download the code from Github.
