On Feb 10, 2016, at 1:06 AM, Greg Lindahl <lind...@pbm.com> wrote: > Hi! I'm a new employee of the Internet Archive, formerly a search > engine guy, mostly working on search for the Wayback Machine. In my > spare time I've been working on a visualization of dates and entities > in scanned book contents. There's a blog post about it here: > > https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-books-in-the-21st-century/ > > And the demo itself is here: > > https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/ > > I'm going to be attending the Philly conference, and I'm looking > forward to hearing from folks about other discovery tools driven > by content or algorithmic metadata. > > — > greg
Yes, very cool. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. >From my point of view, Greg, you have created an alternative and supplemental >index to one or more books. While printed books have a whole lot of utility, >digital books manifest a different sets of functionality. Imagine having a >digital book and then providing services against the text that go beyond find. >(“Blasphemy!”) One of the services would be graphing as you (literally) >illustrate above. Other services might be parts-of-speech analysis, definition >extraction, tabulations of additional named-entities, etc. While reading >fiction is many times intended for “just fun”, I believe these sorts of >services may make fiction more interesting as well as more accessible for >study. Again, thank you. — Eric Lease Morgan
