Now that I’ve talked in circles for a few days, I thought it would be nice, as a change of pace, to circle back to looking at books as visual maps.
In this next iteration of the interface, you can type in (or highlight by dragging with your mouse) whatever text you want to search for throughout the book. I’ve discovered all sorts of interesting things in the short time I’ve been playing with it.
I’m trying to build up to a more general capability, where you can search for larger patterns, or find relationships between different parts of a book.
But one step at a time.
That’s pretty nifty, this was the first thing I thought of when the ability to highlight names showed up, though as I haven’t read Pride and Prejudice I can’t think of anything clever to try. Best I thought of was to look for underscores to see where emphasis was focused, one passage that stood out also noted the characters were speaking “in a constrained manner” and “with emphasis”.
The idea of finding relationships across text reminds me of a data visualization program called fv, which indicates the density and distance of repetitions of various length, illustrated here: http://mattmahoney.net/dc/dce.html#Section_21
This reminds me of Sublime Text’s minimap, the difference being that said minimap is only one single column, basically a miniature rendering of the text buffer.