The Literature Map - find authors who are similar to your favorites

[Are_grits_groceries]

http://www.literature-map.com/

Well, I could spend some time with this.

[TNDemo]

1. Wow, thanks.

I sent this out to my book club.

[livvy]

2. That is very cool, and useful too!

Bookmarked that baby. TY for posting. :)

[NV Whino]

3. I did a fast test

It seems to rely on genre alone more than quality within the genre. For instance, Martha grimes, Ruth Rendell and Barbara Vine bear little resemblance to Minette Walters' (my choice) quality, although Elizabeth George comes close.

[Are_grits_groceries]

9. Have you read Denise Mina? Nt

[NV Whino]

12. I haven't, but I'll check her out.

Thanks.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

4. way cool! kr

[phantom power]

5. Multidimensional scaling - cool

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_scaling
http://www.analytictech.com/borgatti/mds.htm

The fun question: what underlying feature space and distance metric are they using?

[OneGrassRoot]

6. Cool beans, will share. Thanks! :) n/t

[MineralMan]

7. Very interesting. This appears to be built on

reader preferences. Something like Amazon's "If you enjoyed this book, you might also like..." sort of thing. What I found interesting is that Ayn Rand shows up not too far from Ernest Hemingway and several other authors, like Heinlein and others.

Oddly enough, Shakespeare shows up in almost every set I tried. I like this very much, and linked to it on my Facebook page. Some of the close matches were quite interesting.

[timtom]

8. Great stuff.

Thanks.

[saras]

10. Just like with music, it consistently points me towards the boring mainstream.

It doesn't understand anything about the CONTENT of books, it just tells who what other people who read the book also read, and of that only those who actively participate in the system.

It didn't have entries for Shimon Tzabar or Adam Gorightly, and it tells me that people who read Daniel Levitin (a neurologist who studies music) also read Orwell and Tolkien, but not Sacks, Damasio, Dennett, Gardner, Eagleman, or any other science.

If I enter something like Twilight or Danielle Steele, it works, but so what? If I want something like Danielle Steele, there's a whole shelf in the bookstore of stuff that's utterly indistinguishable.

[phantom power]

11. That is because...

Doing what it does is (relatively) easy, whereas doing what you describe would be very very hard.

Also, the methods used obviously can only work to display books known to the system, and so the likelihood of a more unusual book getting into the data obviously drops off. I didn't see any method for entering more data, which was a bit disappointing. I wonder if they got it from a 3rd party like Amazon.