Elliot Lee

Here’s something I came up with last Friday. Perhaps it’s an original idea that I should pursue in the future. For lack of a better name, I call it the automated depersonlization of writing. It was inspired by a neat Ajax app called Writely, a web word processor. Now, a lot of what you’ll publish with a service like that is likely to be private, and for a small intended audience. But there’s sure to be a lot of information in there that would also be helpful for others. So, what my system would do is scan your text for proper nouns, specifics, and personal details, and automatically change them to predefined anonymous descriptors. For example, I’d write a story about someone. Their name could be changed by the computer system to Bob. This means that life lessons can still teach others, while not revealing anything personal about the actual people. That’s the rough idea: it could be later refined.