RiTa: Creativity Support for Computational Literature

The RiTa Toolkit for Computation Literature is a suite of open-source components, tutorials, and examples, providing support for a range of tasks related to the practice of creative writing in programmable media. Designed both as a toolkit for practicing writers and as an end-to-end solution for digital writing courses (the focus of this paper), RiTa covers a range of computational tasks related to literary practice, including text analysis, generation, display and animation, text-to-speech, text-mining, and access to external resources such as WordNet. In courses taught at Brown University, students from a wide range of backgrounds (creative writers, digital artists, media theorists, linguists and programmers, etc.) have been able to quickly achieve facility with the RiTa components, to gain an understanding of core language processing tasks, and to quickly progress on to their own creative language projects.