Many Eyes, a very shiny new visualization site* is featuring a visualization of LibraryThing’s top 50 books Harry Potter is Freaking Popular. Yes he is.
It might be interesting to chart other LibraryThing data in Many Eyes. I’ve only scratched the surface of it, but it looks quite powerful.
*In alpha, which is the new beta.
Hat tip: David Weinberger.
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I’ve added the ability to add and edit author disambiguation text. This isn’t the “real” solution, which is still coming, but if you have the urge to clarify the difference between Steve Martin the author of Shopgirl and Cruel Shoes and Steve Martin the author of Britain and the Slave Trade, go ahead. It may help someone out (“This isn’t funny at all!”) and it will help us later when we have real disambiguation pages.
Steve Martin doesn’t have one yet, but Christopher Locke does.
Results show up in the Helpers log.
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LibraryThing’s gone feed-crazy! Check out Thingology for info on a new feed for comparing a library—a library library—with LibraryThing.
Six posts in 24 hours. Stop me before I blog again!
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Update: Changed feed URL.
I’ve added a cool new feature, building on some work by library programmer Lars Aronsson—Wikipedia citations to all works pages. That is, work pages now list of all the Wikipedia articles that cite the work. The data is also available in feed form.
Here’s how it goes. At the top of J. F. C. Fuller’s A Military History of the Western World it lists how many citations, with a link:
And, down below, it shows all the articles:
How we I did it. Basically, I did a complete run through the Wikipedia dump files (source), parsing out anything that looked like an ISBN and checking if it is. It’s pretty easy. So it sees:
and gets the ISBN. I’ve started in on the harder problem, parsing books without ISBNs, like:
It’s not actually that hard. But it’s fiddly. And it’s one of those problems where each additional percent of accuracy costs 50% more effort.
What’s the most cited books? The most cited book on Wikipedia is… The Official Pokemon Handbook. Surprised? Don’t be. In fact, eighteen of the top twenty most-cited works are Pokemon books. It boggles the mind. Somebody, or a bunch of somebodies went ISBN-happy on all the Pokemon entries. Fortunately, the existence of so many citations to Pokemon does not impair the quality of the rest. It’s just… Wikipedia. There’s a decidedly quirky character to many of the other winners, testimony to some serious passions. Number 28, with 177 citations, is Richard Grimmett‘s Birds of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. I think this effect would be diminished a lot if non-ISBN books were added.
Where did this come from? I owe the idea to Lars Aronsson, who came up with a simple script and ran it against the Wikipedia dumps and posted the results on Web4Lib back in September. I wrote him soon after to see if he was going to provide a public data feed, or if he minded if I did. He did not. His results differed a bit from mine. I’ll be in touch with him to square the differences.
Unfortunately, the Wikipedia data is not updated as often as one might like. The most recent is from November of last year. I’ll keep an eye on the download page, and reparse the data when a new dump comes available.
What’s this about a feed? We’re big fans of openness. And it’s Wikipedia data anyway. So we’ve made a feed of it. You can get it here:
http://www.librarything.com/feeds/WikipediaCitations.xml.gz
UPDATE: I changed the URL and gzipped it. Needness to say, I’m not putting any restrictions on this, but if you do something cool, I’d love to hear about it.
As usual, tell me what you think.
*We’ve seriously considered open-sourcing LibraryThing. But given the state of the code, it would be, as Nabokov said of rough drafts, like passing around samples of our sputum. We may out-source pieces of the code—the pieces we’re happiest about.
**LibraryThing is in the odd position of having almost as much bot traffic as we have person traffic. Google loves us. Guys, you love us too much!
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Update: Author links added. See below.
I’ve added a new page, the Helpers log, that tracks the various ways users help LibraryThing and each other—work, author and tag combinations, author picture and “author nevers.” (John will add author links tomorrow.) The new page will make it easier for eagle-eyed Thingamabrarians to watch over what’s going on with these critical activities, and smite miscreants.
By the way, did you know we are averaging 2,000 work-combination actions per day? Per day, folks! That’s not even works combined, which is higher since a combination will have at least two and and high as twenty. It boggles the mind.
This isn’t a small thing. You guys have up-ended the world of book data. And we’ve only just begun.
Update: Author links added. Unfortunately, we weren’t storing the right data for author links. So it’s only showing ones added since we fixed the system. It also means we don’t know who added links before, not exactly anyhow. Again, apologies.
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As many have noticed, you can now add links to author pages. It’s part of an ongoing effort to give members more control over the site.
We’re still breaking in a new development environment and a related system (Subversion, for the tech-curious) of moving new stuff from development into production. As a result, the author links feature was launched a bit prematurely. That turned out to be not such a bad thing—a bunch of people immediately jumped in and started suggesting improvements, and the feature, minor though it is, was completed faster and better than it would have been otherwise*. Many thanks to everyone who helped troubleshoot, and to everyone who has contributed links.
One thing you’ll notice is that most authors already have a link to their Wikipedia pages, some of which say “unconfirmed” in parentheses. This is a side effect of a script we wrote to go through all the page titles on Wikipedia, match them against all the authors in LibraryThing, and create links. Which works great 90% of the time, but it turns out there are a lot of people in the world with the same name. To us, Alexander Robertson is an author. Our Wikipedia script, though, thought he was a British cop. To rectify this, we had the script say “unconfirmed” next to every author link that hadn’t yet been verified by a human being. So, if you want to be that human being, please check unconfirmed Wikipedia links when you come across them, and either confirm or edit them, as necessary (both options are available by clicking ‘edit’ in the links header).
Adding and confirming links turns out to be quite addictive—I’ve been working through the list of Nobel Prize winners, adding links to the author page of every winner, and reading half the bios in the process. If anyone can suggest other good link sources, please do so in the comments, it would be cool to have a somewhat organized effort to enrich the pages.
* I didn’t actually have anything to add, but I feel like I should throw in a footnote or two. Seems to be LT style.
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I just posted a very long examination of tagging on Amazon and LibraryThing, and what it means over on LibraryThing’s “ideas” blog, Thingology. I’m hoping it gets noticed. Although quite imperfect, I think it’s the first time the failings of “commercial” tagging have been brought to light, and their implications thought through.
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We had an amazing amount of fantastically great entries for the 10 million books / valentines / presidents book pile contest. That’s a lot of superlatives, I know, but trust me, it’s worth it. There were Valentine’s Day themed piles, President’s Day themed piles, and a whole bunch of people took us up on the “best damn book pile ever”. (See the entries here, under the Flickr tag “LibraryThing10mil“).
Several themes emerged, and not just Valentines and Presidents. We had several variations on a heart, showing love from Harlequin to Latin. There was fun with numbers and words, sweet stories, and a surprising number of floating shelves (I’m covetous). Overall, a fantastic collection of book piles. You can see them all here (and several that hadn’t posted to Flickr yet are linked to in these blog comments).
Without further ado, our grand prize winner. madinkbeard’s “We heart LibraryThing” was a stand-out. As an added bonus, you can see all 86 books that were used to create this red spine-d heart here. Madinkbeard will be getting one hundred dollars—to be spent entirely on one book.
We also have five runners up, who will each get a year’s gift membership to LibraryThing.*
Runner up. First, I loved parelle’s “Bookpiles and my love life”, which chronicles a relationship, from a bookstore meeting. The story starts here and is continued here.
Runner up. “Presidents”, this wall of presidents by Pesky Library was beautiful, and, I think, entered by a small library?
Runner up. jadelennox’s “Ten million books and counting” was one of our number themed entries—starting low and going up high. From zero to pi to infinity (and beyond?)!
Runner up. “Books are love!” by j2.0 brings book piling to a whole new level (and also gives us our first nude photo blog post)!
Runner up. And lastly, “Never Enough Time for Reading”, by Munzerr solves the all important question of having a “good body:books ratio” (as mentioned in the photo’s comments).
There are a couple of other photos that we’d like to highlight (let’s call them the the honorable mentions, for lack of a better term).
Honorable mention. Narrisch’s “Babel in Translation” was fantastic (and extra points for using the phrase “book-a-ganza”).
Honorable mention. skullfaced’s Skull stacking managed to combine natural history with Valentine’ s Day and Darwin’s Birthday, and all on a bathroom floor!
Honorable mention. Kristy’s “Pursuit of Love Bookpile” I had picked as a winner, until I realized that she was John’s girlfriend, and that that probably meant she couldn’t win an actual prize.**
Honorable mention. Lastly, we had a soft spot for the books in the truck, nicely packed into their “car seats”.
*Will the winners please email me (abby@librarything.com) so I can send the prizes your way?
**Even though we never explicitly stated it, I think that wives, girlfriends, and children of LT employees, though welcome to submit photos, can’t actually win. Hey, we can make up rules as we go along, can’t we?
UPDATE For some reason, one of these photos that previously contained books now is showing up as a chicken salad (I think. The vegetarian in me isn’t quite sure). In the meantime, Flickr’s down page reports that they’re having a massage (I’m jealous).
UPDATE part deux Apparently Flickr is having a cache problem, leading to “weirdness” (a technical term). So you might see chicken salad, you might see a book pile. Enjoy either way.
I’ve added links to OttoBib, a super-simple citation generator created by Jonathan Otto, an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse.
The feature is available on the work info page (card catalog page) for any specific book—yours or someone else’s. Here’s an example. At present, it only works for books, not for general works. (After all, a work may have 1,000 ISBNs under it.) We hope to extend this in the near future. The results aren’t saved in any way, so if you’re doing a bibliography, you’ll have to do some cut-and-paste work.
We’re linking to OttoBib because we think it was nicely done. But, down the road, LibraryThing may need a stronger solution—one that works with non-ISBN books and which saves and juggles citations, rather than just creating them. We have some ideas along these lines, but your suggestions are always apprecated.
Labels: academic, citations, new feature, new features, ottobib
There’s mere hours left in the 10 million books/valentines/presidents book pile contest. Get your entries in before midnight tonight (EST)! We’ve got 33 so far, and they’re looking good… So who wants that hundred dollar book?
UPDATE: If there’s any doubt that your stuff is awaiting clearance, post your URL in comments, or mail it to Abby. (Flickr doesn’t always post photos from new accounts to public tag pages right away, so if your submission doesn’t show up on this page, tell us!)
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