xkcd comic – Computational Linguistics

I’m always looking to try new things when making videos and I recently had an idea.  I’m a big fan of the web comic xkcd and judging from how often it’s referenced in comments, so are at least a few of my readers.  I’ve been thinking for a while that some of the comics would lend themselves to making short videos.

Or at least they’d lend themselves to my style of no-budget video making.  To be more accurate, a lot of the comics could be made into good videos.  But my no-budget approach limits which ones I think I could do effectively.

So I emailed the creator, Randall Munroe, to see if he’d be OK with it.  After a while he emailed back saying he was fine so long as I provided attribution which I always do anyway.  Actually, the delay in his reply gave me an indication of how much email he must get.  I think the technical term is “a shitload”. 

So here’s the attribution:  this first video is based on this comic about Computational Linguistics.  I changed a few small things to make it topical for me.  And I used me and not a stick figure.  Other than that, I think I stayed true to the spirit of the original. 

[livevideo id=A7C941D1FD504506A0CB2A8C61D77E73]

I’ll be doing more of these over the coming months (I’ve bookmarked a dozen or so I think I can do justice).  Let me know if you have a favourite you’d like to see me attempt.  No fair nominating ones that have people travelling through space and/or alternate dimensions

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