Our Intentions for This Blog:
BookLamp has access to original and interesting data in a myriad of facets regarding books. What is visible to the average user on BookLamp.org is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the data that we collect, including scene-by-scene changes in every metric we track. Character usage isn’t even visible on BookLamp.org, nor are any of the other tools that are not yet ready to roll out for the suggestion engine. But that data exists, and we can find some really interesting things in it to show you.
By analyzing and mapping the rise and fall of Thematic Ingredients, writing styles, and more, we have the capability to shed new light on so many things. Whether it’s tracking what characteristics tend to make a Romance title successful on the market (take a guess), the rise of Density and more serious themes over the course of the Harry Potter series, or author attribution research to take a guess at which politicians seem to be writing their own books, BookLamp and this blog aim to inspire, educate, and explore the cool hidden side of book analytics.
So, with this access to a large amount of new information about books, we knew we wanted to have a place to talk about the cool things we were seeing, but not necessarily going to include as a useful tool on BookLamp.org. The truth of this blog is that we are taking some big inspiration from a blog called OKTrends (by OKCupid.com). They provide entertaining, thought provoking insights to human nature by using the data they’ve acquired through their own site, and we’d like to do something similar – only through the books we read, and the literature we discover.
So the plan is that, from time to time, we’ll release a new post filled with intriguing data about books and authors you may have thought you already knew everything about. Where we can, we’ll have charts and graphs, so if you happen to be a good data visualization person, you should consider contacting us (we could use the extra skills). We hope you’ll subscribe and come back again to see what – well, what we think is interesting.
Come Back Soon, Let Us Know How We’re Doing:
You’ll notice as you visit us that we’re always polishing up, always keeping close to our community, and that your voice will always matter. Literally, my official title – given to me one evening while in the middle of deep, intellectual conversation about something of great importance, I’m sure – is He Who Listens to Those Who Talk. Seriously. It’s on my business cards (barely fits). So if you talk, we’ll listen. You might also notice that our book corpus is starting out at about 20,000 books right now. As you have probably figured, the number of books in our system is a very important thing to our project – we can only find you a matching book if there’s a book in our system that matches. The goal of our site is to help spread the awareness of what we’re doing in the hopes of encouraging more publishers to step forward and participate in the project. At the end of the day, we want to make everyone’s books discoverable. So if you know someone that should know about what we’re working on, please feel free to introduce us.
That’s all for now. Thanks for stopping by!
Sidian Jones – He Who Listens to Those Who Talk
