TagShadow Forum » Tag: books

TagShadow Forum » Tag: books - Recent Topics http://tagshadow.com/forum/tags/books a quantitative visual SFF book recommendation ... thingy en-US Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:24:52 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 <![CDATA[Search]]> q http://tagshadow.com/forum/search.php MentatJack on "The lesser used tenses" http://tagshadow.com/forum/topic/the-lesser-used-tenses#post-3 Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:56:29 +0000 MentatJack 3@http://tagshadow.com/forum/ I find it most important to record the things that distinguish a small subset of books from the larger collection. A great example is tense. The overwhelming majority of fiction is told in past tense. This makes sense as the reader is inevitably reading a book that was published in the past, written in the past and conceived in the past. The beginning writer that doesn't know this convention can often be identified as such even if their tense usage is consistent and their prose otherwise adequate. However, there are some great examples of the present tense used well, and I make it a habit to tag these books as such whenever the opportunity presents itself. This is my list, and I'd love to find more examples. <ul> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553380958?ie=UTF8&tag=tagshadow-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0553380958">Snow Crash</a> by Neal Stephenson</li> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553591568?ie=UTF8&tag=tagshadow-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0553591568">The Mirrored Heavens</a> by David J. Williams</li> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553385429?ie=UTF8&tag=tagshadow-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0553385429">The Burning Skies</a> by David J. Williams</li> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307454355?ie=UTF8&tag=tagshadow-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0307454355">Jack Wakes Up</a> by Seth Harwood</li> </ul> As the title implies, I'm sure someone out there has gotten a book published in something other than present or past. I'd suspect that a work translated into English might be the place to look for such a beast. Surprise me! MentatJack on "TagShadow - A simple explanation" http://tagshadow.com/forum/topic/tagshadow-a-simple-explanation-1#post-7 Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:11:53 +0000 MentatJack 7@http://tagshadow.com/forum/ Tag shadow is a an intersection of art and geekiness. The goal is to visualize a group of books into beautiful and unusual groupings. The following description is a work in progress and I'd very much like input on how clearly this explains the concepts. Two Dimensions To understand what's going on, think about 2 of your favorite things. I'm going to start with science fiction and vampires. One way to organize all your books about Science Fiction and vampires would be to place the science fiction on one bookshelf and the vampires on another bookshelf. Obviously the problem is that some books are about both science fiction and vampires to one degree or another. Lets put all of those books on one book shelf together. Place the books that are about MOST about vampires on the top shelf and as you move down the shelves add the books that are less and less about vampires. Now look at each of these shelves individually. From left to right, order the books by how much they feel like science fiction. Once you're done you have a rather odd book shelf, but it serves one purpose perfectly. It helps you find exactly the mix of science fiction and vampires that you're in the mood for at a given point. And if a friend comes over, they can browse around until they find a book they've read and liked and it's likely they'll like the books shelved near by. Three Dimensions Now lets assume you're organizing a convention for aficionados of science fiction, monsters, and magic. In the dealer room you decide to arrange the tables such that the science fiction is more concentrated at the front and monsters are more concentrated to the left. So, if you're wanting to find a table with the a lot of science fiction but no monsters, you'd make your way to the front of the room and to the right. At every table we're going to organize stacks of books such that the more magic they have in them the higher they are in a stack. Some vendors might use a shelf for the same purpose, but the idea is the same. What we now have is a way to organize 3 ways of describing books using the 3 dimensions we're used to interacting with. Computer Screens Are Flat We use many different ways to visualize 3 dimensions on a flat display. Think about the previous example, but imaging it in a weightless environment where books could use the entire height of the room to describe how much magic they had in them. One way to understand in 2 dimensions what's happening in 3 dimensions would be to shine a bright light through the room of books and see what the SHADOW looked like on the wall. You'd have to move the light around a while until you found a direction which best captured the 3 dimensional groupings in the shadow. I'm not going to go into details here, but that's a problem that's got a fairly good mathematical solution. That solution isn't limited to 3 dimensions. In fact, we can figure out a 2 dimensional plot derived from hundreds (or even thousands) of descriptive tags. Tags + Shadow I decided to call the groupings of books that I derive from all the tag information a TagShadow. Hopefully you have a general idea what I'm trying to accomplish at this point. Click on tags, hover over points and just explore. MentatJack on "The creative team" http://tagshadow.com/forum/topic/the-creative-team#post-4 Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:37:14 +0000 MentatJack 4@http://tagshadow.com/forum/ When I think about the tags I might use to describe a book, the first that comes to mind is author. There are plenty of books, such as anthologies, that feature many writers and prominently mention the editor. Even with books by a single author there are plenty of other creative people associated with the publication. Here are a few that come immediately to mind. <ul> <li>agent</li> <li>editor</li> <li>cover artist</li> </ul> All of these provide meaningful groupings that are not necessarily just groupings of authors. MentatJack on "The source of this idea" http://tagshadow.com/forum/topic/the-source-of-this-idea#post-2 Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:39:38 +0000 MentatJack 2@http://tagshadow.com/forum/ When I saw <a href="http://opinion.berkeley.edu/">Opinion Space</a> I immediately latched on to using the same concept for book recommendations. I spent a few weeks searching for someone else who had already done this and came up with nothing. I wanted tag shadow to be heavily user based and was immediate struck with the chicken and egg problem. I needed data to process so that potential users would know what it is that I'm trying to do. I decided to test my code on a version that used data from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.am">Amazon</a>. The first thing I realized when I started gathering data on amazon was that tag usage was rather chaotic. You see this everywhere. One person labels science fiction with the tag "sciFi" whereas another person uses "science fiction." Some people tag all science fiction additionally as "fantasy". Some just settle for "sff" or "speculative fiction." I immediately set about dealing with this issue. And then I read an article that eased my mind greatly: <a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html">Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags</a>. I particularly enjoyed the comparison of yahoo versus google, but this is the chunk that really stuck with me: <blockquote>This looks relatively simple with the Apple/Mac/OSX example, but when we start to expand to other groups of related words, like movies, film, and cinema, the case for the thesaurus becomes much less clear. I learned this from Brad Fitzpatrick's design for LiveJournal, which allows user to list their own interests. LiveJournal makes absolutely no attempt to enforce solidarity or a thesaurus or a minimal set of terms, no check-box, no drop-box, just free-text typing. Some people say they're interested in movies. Some people say they're interested in film. Some people say they're interested in cinema. The cataloguers first reaction to that is, "Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people." Those terms actually encode different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches.</blockquote> Once I decided to just work with whatever input I was given, everything just kind of fell into place. As of this writing, I have a version of the Amazon backed TagShadow with most of the display functionality that I envisioned. Check out this <a href="http://tagshadow.com/amazon/pca.php?tagId=85">alternate history</a> visualization.