NovelContext - a literature based social document project · Monday October 31, 2005
I’ve been working quietly on a project behind the scenes, whilst changing jobs and buying a house, that project is now ready to go public.
It is NovelContext, which is a literature based version of the Social Documents ideas I’ve been exploring via talkeuro and discussing on this site. The NovelContext project wiki is ready for business. Please come and help us define what the project should be, this will only be better with your help.
Some outline notes to give you a sense of flavour.
NovelContext – Making literature social, collaborative and connected.
What is it?
Novel context is a social software application designed to allow people to read literature (mainly out-of-copyright) and collectively build a semantic web of information connecting the the authors and novels together, doing for literature what wikipedia has done for encyclopedias.
A longer pitch
Our literature is not part of the internet, it is just available on it. Using out-of-copyright books and the energy of the hive mind, NovelContext aims to use structured metadata to refresh these “old books”.
Gutenberg has been successful for a decade, but it’s a read only service, there is no connection with the rest of the internet. This missing context helps us to place literature, the humour in Shakespeare can be hard – we just don’t get the jokes anymore.
These dense lumps of prose need to be unlocked and reconnected with our lives. Starting, circa 1900, in Victorian London, growing outwards from there to Europe, America, India or Japan, other languages and across time.
This emphasis on existing content is important – many current projects are solely about new content. Yet these old texts are popular too, so the hive-mind can turn its hand to older literary content, but using topic maps rather than tag clouds.
NovelContext will support reading, commenting, plus annotation and generation of the topic map. Individuals will volunteer to curate a book, building up the context using the topic maps, others can simply read and comment.
A semantic web of the world’s literature is the goal. Web APIs will let us connect these books to the resources of the internet, be they encyclopedias, maps or recommendation services and in return offer up the rich context of this literature. Thus, the reader can see that Sherlock Holmes’ London is also that of Dorian Gray.
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