On Feb 10, 2016, at 1:06 AM, Greg Lindahl <[log in to unmask]> 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