Wolfram|Alpha and Literature
On 18 May 2009, a new Internet service called Wolfram|Alpha was unleashed to the world. It’s a “computational knowledge engine”, but looks similar enough like a search engine to confuse a whole lot of Internet users still expecting conventional Google-like responses to queries.
Contrary to first impressions, it is *not* a search engine, but a rather interesting experiment. I’ll let the site itself describe their intentions:
Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.
After playing with it awhile, you’ll immediately notice that Wolfram|Alpha (which is incidentally named after its creator Stephen Wolfram, a British physicist, mathematician and MacArthur Fellow) plays in a different space than Google. Let’s just say you wouldn’t use it to look for the best restaurants in town.
But what has it got to do with books? Out of curiosity I started to put in literature related searches in Wolfram|Alpha, and was pleasantly surprised at what I found.
Searching for a book title returns a brief summary in a tabular format (click on the image(s) to see the full-sized screenshots):
In fact, a generic search term like ‘literature’ would give you some ideas:
I also tried to compare authors:
You can clearly see the lifetime overlaps, which you can potentially use to deduce further information about the respective authors work (i.e. would it be possible that one could have influenced the other, etc).
I also tried a branch of literary theory:
They couldn’t give an answer, as you can see, but I had a chance to leave a message! So I did:
I’m very interested in using Wolfram|Alpha to explore Literary Criticism and Theory and how everything may relate to one another – perhaps in terms of influence or commonalities.
Wolfram|Alpha reminds me of Freakonomics – where data and statistics from a particular subject, when cross-referenced with social/cultural data can yield incredibly interesting and unexpected results. For other subject matters Wolfram|Alpha is capable of getting mathematical data from different sources, collate them and present them in a graphical manner (charts and graphs generated on the fly). It’s clearly not there yet where literature is concerned, but who knows what else it can find in the future, as users get used to its search string idiosyncrasies.
You could also try it with different search terms – and let us know what nuggets of information you may have found from using it in the comments.
Read MoreSo you like ebooks, Kindle, Stephen King, and Amazon, and little else, huh?
In this new incarnation of Bookbabble (those who missed the boat, you can catch up here), I decided to add a tag cloud widget to the site, just to add a little snazziness. Looking at the cloud at this present time, however, is getting me a little worried.
If you only go by the tag cloud now, it would seem to those who just tuned in to Bookbabble that we don’t do much but talk about ebooks, Kindle, love Stephen King and probably advocate Amazon as the be-all-end-all book retailer (this last part is probably true, since I’m using their affiliate code for all our book links).
It’s a good thing Joyce is quite prominent now, not because we want to appear ‘serious’ or hoping having Joyce there lends us some credibility, but just to help convey the sort of diversity we’re really seeing from our discussions. I suppose the loss of our old posts tended to skew the distribution a little.
I’m just saying…!
Read MoreWelcome to Irene: a full-fledged babbler!
After more appearances than we care to count, Irene Wilde, who has kindly made time to chat with the rest of us, now has her very own About page here in Bookbabble. And it’s about time too… 
Bookbabble’s First Anniversary Coming Up!
Ok, a year just whizzed by, and before we knew it, the crew has been babbling books for almost a year now!
A little more than a year ago, Lars, Gem, Bjorn and I decided that talking about books was something that isn’t too crazy an idea, and decided to jump straight into it, with nary a thought on the consequences. So in early March, the gang met up online armed with Skype accounts and mics and started to talk trash, as you would expect. Even though we’ve actually known each other for a while by that time, it was really the first time that we got together and actually talked.
The first few times we met were ‘dry-runs’, and while we actually recorded our first show on the 30 March 2008, it was released to the unsuspecting world on the 14 April 2008, and that is when we’ll be basing our anniversary.
I’ll save some of the reminiscing for the actual anniversary show that we’ve got coming up, but this post is more than just a heads-up. Renee had the nice idea of doing this buildup to the anniversary show, and here we would like to humbly ask every one of our listeners (yes, the two of you sitting over there) to write in with some feedback. Everything goes, you hear – good and bad, via email, audio, video (if you dare), pretty much whatever – all to commemorate this humble little endeavour we’ve got on our hands.
Fire it up, please – we’d like to get as much feedback as we can!
(photo credit)
Update 20090329: Silly me, I’d forgotten to mention where you could actually send feedback! Send them all to feedback (at) bookbabble.net, or as comments on this very website.
Read MoreLiving outside the US but want a Kindle?
Sorry for the Kindle-centric news recently, but frankly this news is one of the biggest in the industry right now, with all the speculation, gasps of disbelieve and howls of protest amidst believers singing in the streets over the supposed digital revolution.
I would love to get one – check out the video on the Kindle 2 page if you haven’t already. Oh so nice…
If you didn’t already know, the Kindle is currently only sold in the States. But what if you’re staying outside of the country, but have the opportunity to get your grubby hands on one? Perhaps a relative or friend is willing to ship one over. Maybe you’re planning a trip to America yourself, and hoping to spread some greenback love for the good of the economy (whatever!).
But before you spend that hard-earned cash on this decidedly sexy and incredibly expensive device, it may be useful to know this: even if you could get the Kindle, you are not able to purchase content for the device (which is, of course, the raison d’etre of the whole thing). From Amazon’s Help page:
At this time, we are unable to offer the Amazon Kindle 2 and associated digital content from the Kindle Store to our international customers due to import/export laws and other restrictions. When you place your order for an Amazon Kindle, the shipping address for the delivery must be recognized by our systems as valid U.S. addresses.
To successfully purchase digital content from the Amazon Kindle Store, the 1-Click payment method listed on the Manage Your Kindle page must be a credit or debit card issued by a U.S. Bank with a U.S. billing address. We value our international customers and hope to make Kindle available internationally in the future.
Therefore, unless the situation changes, no point getting the Kindle if you’re not living in the US. Time to look for alternative readers, people.
Ok, this is definitely the last Kindle-related news for at least a couple of weeks. Promise.
Read MoreHappy New Year from Bookbabble!
I don’t know about you, but there is this nagging feeling of OH-MY-GOODNESS-WHERE-THE-HELL-DID-THE-YEAR-GO where I’m concerned. The year has flown past, and we’re staring at yet another new year come too quickly, and a gloomy one at that.
But a new year ahead brings new vistas and new opportunities, not to mention prospects of many more wonderful books to savour.
Bookbabble wishes all a very happy New Year!
