
Project Alexandria – A graph based book exploration and recommendation engine - ankit_tandon
http://projectalexandria.net/
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oinksoft
It took a few tries to find a non-classic book I've read and own. I was
surprised by the neighbors/recommendations for Henri Troyat's _Tolstoy_ :

\- _George Orwell 's 1984_, a "Bloom's Guides" edition (Cliff's Notes-looking
thing)

\- _Benjamin Franklin_ , a graphic-novel format biography of the statesman and
scientist

\- _Gran Pionero de Beísbol_ , a graphic-novel format biography of Jackie
Robison

\- _Wilma Rudolph_ , a graphic-novel format biography of the Olympian runner

\- _Martin and John_ , "with a frankness about sexuality rarely seen in
contemporary fiction ... a haunting, daring, and heartrending debut novel that
speaks of gay life"

Those results don't seem to reflect the stated methodology in the "About"
section... the only commonality is that three of the five are biographies. I
expected more things to do with Russian literature, or literary biographies
contemporary with Troyat's.

I'm interested in the project's implementation, it's too bad it isn't open
source.

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sundarurfriend
Interesting project, and the visual display is appealing, but the results
don't seem to be any better than from the recommendation engines of, for eg.,
Goodreads. In many cases, the other nodes end up being mostly other books by
the same author, with one or two books by different authors in the same genre.

One thing that could improve this as an exploration and discovery engine is an
option to _disallow_ books by the same author as the original we input. That
would allow me to, for eg., check out what books the engine thinks are similar
to 'Thief of Time', without the result being just a bunch of other Discworld
books (which is not really useful or new information).

Also, why so few related nodes (five) in the result? Is this a constraint
placed explicitly or just a feature of the algorithm? Having more books
returned would also help increase the probability that the user finds
something actually useful and previously unknown to them.

~~~
sundarurfriend
Another interesting possibility would be allowing the user to enter two books,
and then showing what the engine thinks the routes from one to the other are.

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smartial_arts
Not sure how the search suggestions are meant to work, but when typing
"Drunkard's Walk" I can see the book at the top of the result's list, although
when typing the author's name, "Leonard Mlodinow" I get no matches for his
books at all.

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danpalmer
Took me a few popular authors to find one that was in the database, and when I
finally tried the book I'm reading, the only recommendation it said it was
like was way off - The Devil in White City has no relation that I can see to
The Lost Symbol.

~~~
ankit_tandon
Add a ":" before your search for author search. Sorry should have made that
clearer

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stared
It would be great if the graph was larger. Or rather - any non-trivial graph,
with diameter > 2 and interconnections (rather just star of 6 nodes).

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gilleain
If you click on a leaf node, it walks the graph, expanding as it goes. Managed
to find a triangle at one point. I wonder what the edges really are - some
similarity measure, but what exactly?

~~~
odabaxok
If you hover over an edge you will see what similarity measure it uses.

