[HN Gopher] A visual book recommender
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A visual book recommender
Author : squidhunter
Score : 321 points
Date : 2023-04-27 11:40 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nathanrooy.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (nathanrooy.github.io)
| FreeHugs wrote:
| Reminds me of https://www.literature-map.com
|
| Which is a map of all authors in the world sorted by overlap in
| readership. I found some of my favorite writers by browsing it.
|
| I wonder which approach is better suited to find something that
| is spot on to my interests.
|
| When I think of my favorite books, they usually are the most
| popular books of their authors.
|
| Are there any counterexamples, where an author wrote a book that
| is more profound than their biggest hit but got overlooked for
| some reason?
| Tyr42 wrote:
| I wish it was easier to see some of their books, or even copy
| and search the author from each page.
| lkbm wrote:
| Oh man, Literature Map looks really great for finding recs.
|
| That said, I do think book-level might be much more valuable.
| My first thought for this was _Night in the Lonesome October_
| by Roger Zelazny. I haven 't read anything else by him yet
| because my brother informs me his other stuff is entirely
| different. Looking at Goodreads, I think that qualifies as far
| from his biggest hit. Is it "more profound?"? Doubtful, but
| seems likely that you shouldn't group it with his others. I
| want recommendations based on the book I like, not the author I
| mostly might-not.
|
| A better example might be how Stephenie Meyer wrote the
| _extremely_ popular Twilight books, and also _The Host_ which
| is much less well-known, and better in many respects. Probably
| qualifies as more profound, too--it 's told from the
| perspective of a parasitic alien. Picture the Yeerks from
| Animorphs if you read those.)
| Zufriedenheit wrote:
| Impressive Tool. I would love to have the same for movies.
| stared wrote:
| For post-t-SNE processing to get non-overlapping items, see also:
| https://github.com/Quasimondo/RasterFairy
|
| I also used more crude algorithms that sort by X, group elements
| in buckets, and within each, sort by Y. Then we get a grid of
| elements. The result is less high-quality than with iterative
| algorithms (and depends on if we sort by X or Y first), but it is
| hard to beat its simplicity.
| igaloly wrote:
| Nice! Is there a github repo?
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| eshnil wrote:
| > Only include reviews which came from users who had at least 10
| reviews.
|
| Not sure if that's a good idea. It shrinks the set of genuine
| readers and overweights the set of professional spammers.
| mxfh wrote:
| similiar t-SNE visualisation, just for papers:
|
| https://static.nomic.ai/pubmed.html
|
| running on their deepscatter visualization engine:
|
| https://github.com/nomic-ai/deepscatter
|
| that keeps things dynamic for rendering
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Id love to have https://same.energy for book contents.
| etra0 wrote:
| woah, didn't know about this site! it is super cool!
|
| It feels like what Pinterest would be without the annoying
| bits.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Be careful, it'll become your defacto image search, and then
| you'll be really disappointed when you realize it hasn't been
| updated in ages
| internetter wrote:
| This is awesome. I only wish the author haden't waited years
| after scrapping! Many books I've loved have been released in the
| past couple years
| paweladamczuk wrote:
| This is really cool!
|
| I wish the accompanying article was longer. I can't fully grasp
| how it was done because I don't know enough about the concepts
| mentioned.
| aroc wrote:
| This is great. I think visual tools like this are under utilized.
| They're fun to use and can often reveal interesting insights.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I'm surprised there are enough books published under the category
| of "Reverse-harem" to make it its own category along with things
| like "Horror", "Fantasy", "Business", etc.
| motoboi wrote:
| Really interesting that my favorite sci-fi book, Pandora's Star
| is in the middle of a void in the center of a large sci-fi
| cluster.
|
| It explains why I couldn't find anything like it.
|
| Also very explanatory the fact the Tolkien's The Two Towers is
| right by its side, because I also love that book.
|
| And now I'm already downloading the other "outliers" close to
| Pandora's Star.
| nycdatasci wrote:
| Cool visualization, but the model needs work. The closest book to
| "Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets" is "The Victorian
| Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners".
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Hypothesis: the sort of person who reads "The Victorian...", is
| likely to both like Harry Potter books, and also to review them
| enthusiastically online. The typical HP child reader, does not
| review books online. Just an hypothesis.
| badcppdev wrote:
| I have a theory (after having searched for The Diamond Age)
| that certain very popular books are ironically not going to be
| close to similar books because they appear on so many varied
| reading lists.
|
| There's probably a graph theory phenomena that describes what
| I'm thinking.
| twosdai wrote:
| Yeah basically what I think you're saying is that in a
| weighted graph, if there are edge weights which are orders of
| magnitude larger then the average it throws off certain
| models. Like nearest neighbor.
|
| Basically just prune the top and bottom %1 of weighted edges
| to get an appropriate average. Would be my guess for a fix.
| bwb wrote:
| Yep this is 100% true (i run shepherd.com).
|
| Within our data books like lord of the rings and harry potter
| are nearly impossible to map for "books like" because they
| are connected to so many other things. I am working now to
| fine tune our model, but it has been an interesting
| challenge.
| narcraft wrote:
| Sounds about right to me!
| gnewton77 wrote:
| The visualizations remind me of those in a paper I co-authored a
| while ago (2009) visualizing ~2400 scientific journal / ~5.7M
| full-text articles: "Semantic Journal Mapping for Search
| Visualization in a Large Scale Article Digital Library"
| https://nrc-publications.canada.ca/eng/view/accepted/?id=63e...
| mhb wrote:
| I also like https://shepherd.com/. One of its interesting
| features is that authors list their five favorite books and say
| why they like them.
| cainxinth wrote:
| Lol, I tried it out and put in one of my favorite books,
| "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis and it suggested me a list of
| "The best novels to help you understand the rich and
| dysfunctional."
|
| Spot on! Bookmarked!
| pedrosbmartins wrote:
| Which reminds me of https://fivebooks.com/, where people from a
| particular field are asked their top five book recommendations
| for a given theme. The interview format is great, and I've
| picked up a few recommended books along the way.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > The Best Apocalyptic Fiction, recommended by Elliot
| Ackerman
|
| > 1. The King James Bible
| bwb wrote:
| Thanks for the nice mention :)
|
| I am about a week away from launching genre pages, age pages,
| and filters for all those things. So on the hard-science-
| fiction page, you can filter to see books in a variety of fun
| ways and keep following your curiosity:
|
| Image showing how it works:
| https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
|
| Hit me up at ben@shepherd.com if you want to try the early
| preview, just tell me your fav genre and ill send you a link.
| Rediscover wrote:
| Nice article. Not what I was expecting...
|
| I was really hoping this would address "Visual Book" like in
| hushiginoHai nonadeia, Fushigi no Umi no Nadia/The Secret of Blue
| Water. The LaserDiscs used to say "Visual Book" in every episode.
|
| Great animated series (to me), a mix of 20,000 Leagues Under the
| Sea and the Illuminati.
|
| Do NOT watch it with the english subs. Suffer with the Japanese,
| even if You don't speak it. You don't need the junk verbal
| translation, You will still get the main concepts. And Hanson's
| driving is so much more manaical in Japanese.
| qumpis wrote:
| This looks super cool, but why not use this tool as a non-visual
| tool to show similar books given a title? As far as I know there
| aren't many tools for this
|
| Also it would be super cool if we could import out goodreads
| reading lists and see them on the cluster
| skuxxlife wrote:
| This is super cool! I actually have been working on a new book
| recommendation site (https://braincandy.com) that has a similar-
| ish (but much smaller scale) visualization for book similarity.
| It is really interesting how certain genres tend to be much more
| insular than others and it can be a real challenge to break out
| of genre boxes when making recommendations. There's so many books
| out there on the edges and in-betweens that get lost when they
| don't fit neatly into an existing popular genre, and those indeed
| can be some of the most interesting.
| thadk wrote:
| Anvaka's YASIV was an extremely strong tool in this space until
| Amazon discontinued the API it relied on.
|
| https://twitter.com/anvaka https://twitter.com/yasivcom
| bwb wrote:
| This is an awesome visualization, I am so impressed :). I've been
| working on (shepherd.com) with a similar goal to try to bring in
| human groupings to try to determine book connections via the many
| angles humans bring to the table. And more serendipity like
| wandering a local bookstore. I really love how you have done
| this.
|
| Dropping you an email in a few hours :)
| archydeb wrote:
| Love this. Bought a couple of books similar to "Midnight's
| Children' - author should definitely think about adding affiliate
| links!
| tpttt wrote:
| Made an account just to comment on this. Look incredible.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Funny that most remote and isolated clusters ended up being m-m-
| romance and ... manga.
| brubsby wrote:
| The gang of four design patterns book being two away from a MAGA
| book is funny.
| jasonshen wrote:
| Did I miss how we are supposed to get recommendations from what
| OP built?
| _dwt wrote:
| Find something on the map that you know you like. Now look
| around it to see similar (i.e. if you like this, you're likely
| to like that) books.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Kind of hacky but I built something similar to apply the page
| rank algorithm to the authors referenced between books of various
| topics, here's the result for science:
|
| https://camjohnson26.github.io/author-graph/science/
|
| https://github.com/CamJohnson26/author-graph
|
| Clearly needs a lot of data clean up but still was very helpful
| for discovering important scientists and their approximate
| relative impact
| butterNaN wrote:
| Something's wrong here. I was very excited to explore this, until
| I searched for "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. A nearby
| book - "Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again" by
| Donald J. Trump.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Have you presented this to LibraryThing?
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(page generated 2023-04-27 23:00 UTC)