This is a plot of the books on Amazon that were tagged with both sceince fiction and vampire. I'm only showing books, my data isn't currently being refreshed, and my list of books only includes those categorized as SFF on amazon.
The vertical axis corresponds to the percentage of people that tagged the book that tagged it "vampire." The horizontal is the same for "science fiction."
An important aspect of the TagShadow project is plotting the resulting data. This page is a result of my experimenting.
Because I've been enjoying the power and versitility of jQuery, I made use of flot. That's prounced just like plot, except with an F. In Danish flot means "attractive" or "stylish" and both visually and code wise I agree with the chosen moniker. It was delightfully straight forward to pull together the above display. I roughly documented my progress: Version 1, Version 2 and Version 3
I wanted to chose 2 tags that wouldn't normally be associated. I tried a few others that didn't result in enough books, like Cyberpunk vs Space Opera and Alternate History vs Magic
At this stage, the TagShadow project has a 15000x1500 matrix where each row corresponds to a book and each column corresponds to a tag. My next step will be to reduce the dimensionality significantly, so that I can plot not just 2 tags, but a projection of that entire matrix. I'm totally getting excited.
#651F2B Turns out many shades of red are used on the covers of vampire books. That's just one that grabbed me.
The final version of TagShadow will be much more interactive. If you want to keep track of TagShadow development or spread the word, here are some ways: