An Atlas of Literature

An Ocean of Books is an interactive map of over 100,000 authors and 145,162 books. On this map every island is an author and every city is a book. If you search the interactive map for your favorite writers you can find other writers that you may enjoy based on how near they appear on the map to your favorites.

The size of an author's island on An Ocean of Books is determined by the amount written about them on the internet. The more times they are mentioned on the world wide web then the bigger their island on the map. The position of the islands and the proximity of authors to each other is determined by the number of connections between them on the internet. If two authors are mentioned in lots of the same articles on the web then the closer they will be on An Ocean of Books.

The connections between authors and therefore their proximity on the map is determined by a machine learning algorithm. If you select an author's name on the map then you can read a short biography. If you zoom in on an author's island then all the writer's books will appear as cities on the map. Click on a book's title and you can read a short introduction to the selected book.



An Ocean of Books is not the first interactive map which has tried to arrange the world's literature based on machine learning algorithms. 100 Years of Sci Fi is an interactive map of science fiction novels listed on Good Reads. All the sci-fi novels on this map are organized by thematic similarity. In other words novels which share common sci-fi themes are grouped closer together. Using the map you can therefore search for your favorite sci-fi novels and authors and find other works of science fiction which share common themes.

Novels on the map are linked when they share common keywords on Good Reads. The novels are placed in clusters of works which share similar keyword signatures. If you click on the 'Legend' button in the map sidebar you can filter the map to show all the works that share a common keyword theme. The map menu also allows you to filter the maps shown by theme, concepts and date of publication.

If you click on an individual novel on the map you can read a brief synopsis of its plot, view its list of keywords and its date of publication.



Last year The Pudding created an interactive map from the covers of 5,000 books, in which the books were arranged by their visual similarity. All 5,000 books mapped on 11 Years of Top-Selling Book Covers, Arranged by Visual Similarity have appeared on the New York Times' 'Best Selling' or 'Also Selling' lists since June 2008.

Color seems to play a very prominent role in determining 'visual similarity' in the machine algorithm used by The Pudding. If you zoom out so that you can see all 5,000 book covers you can see that a lot of the grouping and organization appears to be strongly influenced by the dominant color of each book.

The Pudding's map comes with a number of filters which allow you to explore the book covers by genre and by visual motif. The visual motif filter allows you to highlight on the map images which contain 'faces', 'landscapes', 'smiles' etc. Therefore the motif filter provides another way to explore the book covers by visual similarity.