the tourist map of literature

[piranha]

marvelous and useful toy which enables one to find new writers one might like. i plugged in dorothy dunnett and it came up with some names i don't even recognise. exciting!

via matociquala.

Comments

[prairierabbit.livejournal.com]

Very interesting, thanks! It connected some of my favorite authors whom I *thought* wrote very different sorts of things. Now for time to explore the new authors...

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i am pretty sure that those authors really do write very different sorts of things; i've noticed the same thing. i think it doesn't know anything about the authors other than that people who read A also read B and C and D, and it does some combinatorics with that.

if sufficiently many people who enjoy dunnett also like, say, cherryh, then cherryh ends up close to dunnett. on the surface this isn't a particularly insightful way of doing things, but it ties into the idea that folksonomies can sometimes be as useful as formal classification by experts.