http://tagshadow.com/forum/tags/science-fiction a quantitative visual SFF book recommendation ... thingy en-US Sat, 19 May 2012 12:42:06 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 q http://tagshadow.com/forum/search.php http://tagshadow.com/forum/topic/winter-progress#post-20 Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:34:46 +0000 MentatJack 20@http://tagshadow.com/forum/ <p>I've actually started a blog that's a bit easier to keep updated than this. You can follow it here: <a href="http://tagshadow.wordpress.com">http://tagshadow.wordpress.com</a> </p> http://tagshadow.com/forum/topic/winter-progress#post-19 Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:11:37 +0000 MentatJack 19@http://tagshadow.com/forum/ <p>Over the weekend I added all the <a href="http://futurismic.com/category/fiction/">Futurismic fiction</a> to TagShadow. I haven't read all the stories, but they're good about tagging the stories when they post them. Checkout the resulting <a href="http://tagshadow.com/pca.php?tagName=Futurismic">Futurismic TagShadow</a>. </p> http://tagshadow.com/forum/topic/winter-progress#post-17 Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:10:16 +0000 MentatJack 17@http://tagshadow.com/forum/ <p>This weekend I made some pretty massive progress on the user driven iteration of Tag Shadow. This is a checklist and where I stand:</p> <ul> <li>Manage users - This is handled by the user functionality of this forum.</li> <li>Allow users to add and tag, books and stories. - All that you'll see linked to below was added though a web interface which I will set loose on users after some more testing.</li> <li>Set up a process to update TagShadows as data is added. - This is done, and I've been updating the new <a href="/MasterCloud.php">Master Cloud</a> as I add in what I read.</li> <li>Update the TagShadow page to run off of new user generated data. - I'm pretty happy with where I'm leaving this as of tonight, but there's still some optimization I'd like to work on. Check out the TagShadows for <a href="/pca.php?tagId=273">2009</a>, <a href="http://tagshadow.com/pca.php?tagId=509">novel</a>, and <a href="http://tagshadow.com/pca.php?tagId=28816">Tobias S. Buckell</a></li> <li>Enter all Books and Stories reviewed on <a href="http://MentatJack.com">MentatJack</a> - This has been in the works for a while, as I've worked on the web forms for adding, editing, and tagging. As of tonight the <a href="/MasterCloud.php">Master Cloud</a> represents everything I've reviewed on MentatJack since I started it a few years ago.</li> <li>URL rewriting and other SEO concerns are high on my list of improvements after I get the input forms ready for the users.</li> </ul> http://tagshadow.com/forum/topic/classification-and-spoilers#post-15 Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:15:35 +0000 MentatJack 15@http://tagshadow.com/forum/ <p>Talking with a friend just now, a particularly good example of this came up: Endings. Some people prefer books with happy endings and others prefer depressing endings. Sometimes knowing, even in such broad strokes, how a story ends might feel like a spoiler, but often it's just another useful way to categorize a book. </p> http://tagshadow.com/forum/topic/classification-and-spoilers#post-14 Fri, 09 Oct 2009 08:42:11 +0000 MentatJack 14@http://tagshadow.com/forum/ <p>Spoilers have always annoyed me. Both when reading and when writing reviews of books, the line between knowing what a book is about and knowing enough to not even need to read the book can be rather thin. This happens quite a bit when you tag things. The main categorization of a book is usually safe. Tagging <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/076534825X?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=tagshadow-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=076534825X">Spin</a> by Robert Charles Wilson science fiction is in no way a spoiler, but tagging it <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_uplift">uplift</a> probably is. It's a perfect tag, but that aspect of the story appears rather late in the timeline and might thus be considered a spoiler.</p> <p>I can think of other books where tagging them science fiction instead of fantasy could be considered spoilers. The original <a href="http://tagshadow.com/amazon/pca.php?tagId=4326">Pern</a> trilogy comes to mind. There are plenty of examples where the question of science vs magic or alien vs religion is the central mystery.</p> <p>It strikes me that one benefit of the TagShadow method of recommendation (browsing through clusters of similar books) to an extent protects the reader from the potential spoilers contained in a tag cloud about the book. </p> 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/ <p>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.</p> <p><strong>Two Dimensions</strong><br /> To understand what's going on, think about 2 of your favorite things. I'm going to start with science fiction and vampires.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Now look at each of these shelves individually. From left to right, order the books by how much they feel like science fiction.</p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>Three Dimensions</strong><br /> 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>What we now have is a way to organize 3 ways of describing books using the 3 dimensions we're used to interacting with.</p> <p><strong>Computer Screens Are Flat</strong><br /> 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>Tags + Shadow</strong><br /> 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. </p>