Remember our friend Nick Montfort? I don’t. The name sounds familiar but I don’t remember what we have read of him. I looked him up on Wikipedia and I scrolled through his website, but none of his works stand out to me. If you remember why I know this name, please share in the comments below!

Anyway, I found his NaNoGenMo Novel and thought it was the perfect one for this assignment. His novel Hard West Turn is based on recent events of violence in American history. With the march for gun control that took place this past weekend, I thought the topic was perfectly timed so I was set on studying this one.

From what I can tell, Montfort sources a lot of his content from wikipedia.

He also creates a lot of his own content to help create the narrative.

The main character in his novel is an unnamed man who contemplates a lot about the conflict of his love for his country and the issues within it in regards to mass shootings, gender issues, and religious issues.

Montfort also includes code to ensure that letters are capitalized properly when they are sourced from the outside. Most of his code seems easy to understand, but I’m still trying to figure out how he wrote the code so that these sources intermingled…

Parts of this code make sense. For example, “english” orders the computer to draw from wikipedia as stated in the first screenshot of code above. But I’m confused on the order in which it is commanding the sources be drawn on and how Montfort tells the computer when to start a new paragraph. I’m going to keep looking at this source and hopefully I’ll have more figured out by the time we have class on Monday. If so, I’ll add updates to this post.

UPDATE: Shortly after writing this I realized that Nick Montfort was the guy who wrote the book that taught us to code in  Applied Digital Studies last semester.