Sherry Chandler

Have Coffee, Will Write points the way to the Literature Map:

The Literature Map is part of a site called Gnod — The global network of dreams, intended, according to its owner Mark Gibney to be:

…my experiment in the field of artificial intelligence. Its a self-adapting system, living on this server and ‘talking’ to everyone who comes along. Gnods intention is to learn about the outer world and to learn ‘understanding’ its visitors. This enables gnod to share all its wisdom with you in an intuitive and efficient way. You might call it a search-engine to find things you don’t know about.

Gnooks is the books subset of Gnod. It contains several features, including the map, which seems to work sort of like the The Visual Thesaurus. I’m not sure where it gets its data. Maybe from user input. At first, thought it was a little short on poets but then I got the bright idea to put in Billy Collins and I got all kinds of hits. Before I’d been using names like Jane Kenyon, obviously too old or too much a poet’s poet. I’m sort of intrigued but maybe not really surprised by the connection between Collins and Louis Lamour. There’s also a connect to Larry McMurtry over in the corner beyond the screen shot I put up here.

Click the map. It’s kinda fun to see all those names flash out from Billy’s in a starburst pattern. Also, because it’s his birthday, here’s a link to the Alan Ginsberg search.

Gnod also has areas for music and movies and an intriquing enough area called flork, a place for meeting people, where you can flork around or just flork yourself.