I love books and I’ve read a lot of them. I don’t know exactly when, but at some point I saw just how interconnected the best books are. Not only do they cover similar themes and patterns, but many of them outright name other works and real life people. Read enough and this web thickens from a whispy, ethereal feeling to a solid reality. When we speak of people as well-read what we’re seeing isn’t how many books they’ve read, but the strength of the connections they’ve made in their mind.

I’ve been working on a scheme to make those connections easier to see. I hope that if someone is able to pick them out they’ll more easily be able to make that connection in their own mind.

The technologist in me at first was screaming “CONNECT EVERYTHING!!!!”. Diagram every sentence so that I can know all the ways every word has been used across all time. Of course that would end up with a giant graph that no one would read and so would have precisely zero impact on the world. At this point the question loomed large: what should the product look like, and what schema would need to underpin it?

The product vision

A few principles:

1. People like pretty things, so it has to be pretty.
2. Dissecting ideas out of context kills their vitality.

The data schema

I like graph databases. The node/relationship scheme is especially suited to mapping the sort of complexities that exist in the real world.

This would for sure be better as a diagram, but whatever.

Nodes

A sentence is the basic unit of expression.

Each sentence PRECEDES another sentence.

A paragraph is a unit of thought. It CONTAINS many sentences.

A work COMPRISES many paragraphs. It is often broken up into ‘chapters’, ‘cantos’, ‘books’, &c. Each of those are a division.

A work also CONTAINS many passages. passages in turn CONTAIN sentences and DISCUSS topics.

It is written by a PERSON.

A PASSAGE, PARAGRAPH, or even a SENTENCE discusses TOPICS. For example when Alfred North Whitehead said:

Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness.

That SENTENCE was discussing (at least) a topic you might name “what is a moral education?”.

A TOPIC, in turn can be joined with other related topics under other TOPICS and ultimately a THEME. A THEME for the above quoted might simply be “Education”.

A PERSON is a human being. A fictional PERSON that is created in a known work is a CHARACTER. Gods (eg Zeus) and monsters (eg Scylla) don’t fit into either category well, and so are either a MYTHICALPERSON or MYTHICALBEING

A TRANSLATION is a WORK in it’s own right. It’s translator is of course a PERSON.

Relationships

On the evolving structure.

To bring it all together I’ve got

• WORK
• PERSON
• CHARACTER
• NODE
• PARAGRAPH
• DIVISION
• SENTENCE
• MYTHICALPERSON
• MYTHICALBEING

A person is a human being.kk First thing is first: ideas stick in our minds when we spend time with them, so whatever I build has to be good-looking enough that people spend time reading A web platform (to start) that is beautiful enough that people want to read the books.