Literal walks

This post follows an idea two friends of mine and I (all from Bow Cottage) had in our effort to combine our respective talents of arts, design and computing: literal walks.

The idea follows transcendental walks which I remember reading about on the Lunchtime Playground blog: convert any number - preferably a transcendental number - into a quaternary (base 4) number, and then use the digits 0-3 to guide a north/south/east/west random walk in the cartesian plane. The results are surprising.

Literal walks take the idea to the alphabet level: take a text (any text), transfer it in lowercase letters and delete all non-letter symbols, and then use the sequence of letters to guide a sort-of-random walk with 26 directions corresponding to the 26 letters.

Here's the Mathematica code implementing the idea:

And here are some examples. First, the word 'Mississippi':

The first paragraph of Moby Dick:

A take on Magritte's 'This is not a pipe' (this is not a line):

The March Hare:

Finally, my literal walk signature:

The black dot is the starting point - the gray one, the end point. The thicker line on the top left of the black dot is actually two canceling lines coming from 'h' and 'u'.

I'm not fully satisfied with the code I've come up with - for one thing, it contains a Do loop. But I don't have enough time to change it. Suggestions welcome.