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Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Books / Teh Internets Turning Novels Inside-Out

Posted by Paul Constant on Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 8:13 AM

Back in October, I told you about Small Demons, a then-under-construction website that promised to tag the metadata in every novel. So you could see every song mentioned by name in American Psycho, for instance, or find every novel that ever mentioned "Eye of the Tiger." Tagged novels are not an essential pleasure, but they do provide plenty of opportunities for deep dives into the text. You can follow the action of a contemporary novel on a map, or find out how many novels mention Coca-Cola or CNN.

Small Demons is now in beta, and it has a slick user interface that allows you to look up a multitude of different topics: Titles, authors, series, locations, products, books mentioned in other books, songs, and so on. You can like whole passages of books and—of course there's a social aspect—share it with friends. Small Demons looks like it will live or die based on user interest—the information seems to be largely user-provided, Wikipedia-style. If enough people abandon the fusty and unimaginative interface of Goodreads for this, I could see it taking off. I could also see it winding up as another abandoned website in the infinite ghost town that is the internet. Go check it out and see if it's for you.

(Thanks to Slog tipper Bill for reminding me to go back and check out the site.)

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Comments (10) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

Step 1: Register.

Nope! Step 1 should be browse. How many people would use wikipedia if you had to register before you could read it?

Posted by Westlake, son! on August 1, 2012 at 9:17 AM

It's a cool idea for a site, but right now there's not enough content, and they haven't released the ability for users to do the indexing themselves. Not enough here to draw my attention yet.

Posted by evilvolus on August 1, 2012 at 9:21 AM

What @1 said.

Also, the layout of this sight is too 'design school', superficially pretty, but really difficult to use. List of books is L/R scrolling: fuck you.

The contents not great right now either, but a beta is a beta, so I'll give them a gimme on that.

Also, Paul, your book writing is good, please do more of this and less politicalblog.com mumbo jumbo.

Posted by Asparagus! on August 1, 2012 at 9:33 AM

aannnd, holy shit, that's half typos.

Posted by Asparagus! on August 1, 2012 at 9:33 AM

While it may compete with Goodreads for time and attention, they seem to serve very different functions. GR is about cataloguing and reviewing the books you've read, getting recommendations for new books, tracking your "to read" pile, and that sort of thing.

Small Demons seems more about the value of information on its own, maybe? If the content was there, I can see myself just wandering about freeform and having quite a good time. But I just don't see the same utility that GR provides.

Posted by evilvolus on August 1, 2012 at 9:39 AM

Or it could be a sign of the further dismemberment of the long text art form. Modern technology transforming the experience into a network of references...without some long boring plot...to gum it up.

Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe

on August 1, 2012 at 9:41 AM

What @5 said.

Posted by Renée Krulich (Nay) on August 1, 2012 at 9:56 AM

@6 eh, I don't know if you can like the site unless you HAVE read the long boring plot. Otherwise it's just meaningless this-and-that. It seems to be supplemental rather than transformational.

Posted by LaurenOats on August 1, 2012 at 10:30 AM

The site was just updated and doesn't require registration to browse any longer.

Posted by subface on August 1, 2012 at 1:26 PM

LibraryThing has been doing this for over 6 years with their Common Knowledge project: http://www.librarything.com/commonknowle…

All data is contributed by users. Currently they have 4.4 million facts about books and authors, which is more than the number of articles in the English version of Wikipedia.

Posted by Casey D. on August 1, 2012 at 2:53 PM