whitneymcn:

Excellent:

What?

These sonnets are being built in realtime by digging through hundreds of thousands of tweets per hour looking for only those few which happen to be iniambic pentameter. These tweets are retweeted on the Pentametron twitter feed and collected here in sonnet form.

How?

Pentametron takes each of the 30-60 tweets it receives each second, and looks up each word in a dictionary which lists the stress patterns of every word. If the rhythms of all the words put together seem to add up to iambic pentameter, Pentametron retweets the tweet. In the future, when it has more data to work with, it’ll start trying to create rhymes.

Why?

To find inadvertant poetry in the endless torrents of language that slosh around the internet.