In Magic is Everywhere I’ve investigated the titles of ±900 fantasy books to look for trends in their titles. Magic is the most common word in all titles. Followed by fire, dark & red. In general, terms relating to unpleasant things are more common than those relating to positive aspects. Nevertheless, titles relating directly to magic can be found throughout the visual, indicating that the one thing that binds fantasy books together is, not surprisingly, Magic.
For the books topic of November’s data sketches I wanted to look into fantasy books. It’s really the only genre that I read, besides study books. I always feel that the titles of fantasy books have a certain thing/rhythm in common. To get a decent set of fantasy book titles I started with the top 100 most popular fantasy authors from Amazon. I then used the Goodreads API,to get information about each author, such the number of title and ratings per book.
I used text mining and the t-SNE algorithm to cluster the books on general terms, such as battle, nature, blood or red. This gave each book a position in a 2D plane. Using a travelling salesman approach I connected all the books by the same author with the shortest line and that is really all that is visible in the final product.
For a little bit of flair I encoded the book’s title in sweeping arcs moving around each circle (representing one book). You can read more about the data, sketching & coding on the data sketches’ November write-up.
