Austen character relationships inspire search engine technology
Pray excuse us whilst we indulge our Inner Geek, but dude! How cool is this? Maps of character relationships in Jane Austen novels have been used to program a new kind of search engine that works semantically–in other words, like the human brain works.
In its simplest form, semantic indexing can recognize synonyms, or for example a search in an inventory database for “fruit” could turn up documents listing “apples” and “oranges.”
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Most impressive of all has been the graphic visualization of novels. Coburn says this particular demonstration began with a close collaboration with a Spanish professor who wanted to make a searchable ebook reader for Don Quixote.
“Later,” Coburn says, “we started adding as many Project Gutenberg texts as possible, in whatever languages we happened to know — English, French, German, Polish, Russian.”
To this, Coburn added some software to visualize the semantic data in the database, and the search software became a powerful tool for plot visualization. He began using it to make visualizations of characters in Jane Austen novels, charting their various interactions through the course of the narrative. “And the algorithms seemed to do a really good job of detecting how the characters interacted!”
He’s since applied this visualization tool to other novels, including Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa — one of the largest novels in the English language — and the classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber.
Check out the map of character relationships in Emma!
We must, however, recommend to the programmers that they not feed the engine The Mysteries of Udolpho, because the failure of Mrs. Radcliffe to fix upon a single hero and heroine will break the thing permanently.
