Product | 2018 Fall
Creative Co-Author
Creative Co-author is a creative writing enhancement tool that focuses primarily on pounding out the first draft. It is type-ahead cranked up to eleven. It types ahead, lurks behind, and generally peers over your shoulder while you pound out words in a speed-draft writing reverie.
This second iteration of the co-author will build on the research done in the first iteration and focus on moving from concepts developed in that research to a working interactive anti-writer’s-block tool. In particular, we will improve work recommendations by considering context, look into UX improvements to enhance author flow, and will move to sentence-level generation for richer creative inspiration.
Project Details
Important Questions
- How can we improve word recommendations and even make special case recommendations for a particular context (e.g. location descriptions vs. character descriptions)?
- How can we move to sentence-level language analysis and generation, including “exquisite corpse” style co-authoring of words, phrases, and sentences for unique and surprising effects?
- How can we improve the general user experience to encourage in-flow authorship from the author’s own mind and not typeahead based reactionary writing?
Sample Milestones
- Weeks 1-2: Reassess the research and development from the first iteration. Select a set of incremental improvements to the project appropriate for the scope of a quarter.
- Weeks 3-4: Demonstrate improvements in single word selection.
- Weeks 5-7: Demonstrate the ability to provide full phrases or sentences appropriate to the user experience model.
- Weeks 8-10: Demonstrate improvements in the flow of the user experience.
Outcome
The final project will build on the work of the previous quarter and will begin to demonstrate a usable project for overcoming writer’s block and working in flow.
Faculty and Staff Leads
