The Journal of Scientific Humanities

5 March 2016

As promised, I've been writing some more code over the last few weeks.

You have probably already noticed that I've got a new theme for the blog. I made this over the last couple of weeks, based on the default Casper theme, but with various changes. Hopefully you like it: if so, you can grab the code on GitHub.

I also have two new bots. The first one is pretty stupid, but was fun to make because it interacts with another bot. I called it Operation Bot Leaks. Basically, this bot interacts with Operation Random Words to make WikiLeaks-style headlines regarding the fake Operations that Operation Random Words spits out. Well, I told you it was stupid...

If you want to make your own stupid bot you can get the code on GitHub

The second bot is a little more interesting, and one I've been thinking about for a while. The Journal of Scientific Humanities grabs the title of a random scientific paper, and the title of a random humanities paper, using the DOAJ search API. It heavily relies on some node packages I've been using a lot with my last few bots: random-js, request, and of course twit. The DOAJ API is a bit finicky an the documentation is a little opaque at times, but it was fairly easy to work out in the end. The part of this bot that took the longest was working out where to split the titles, and how to do it. I finally had to bite the bullet and learn some regular expressions with some amazing help from regexr. The end result is a mix of faux journal papers that are either boringly plausible, strangely nonsensical, or hilariously wierd:

I'm hoping for more of the funny weird ones, but I guess we'll see how it goes. If you have any request or suggestions, let me know on Twitter. You can find the code on GitHub.