UnSuggester fallout
Our new anti-recommendation engine UnSuggester (blogged about below), has taken off in a weird way. Today was covered in everything from top-shelf library bloggers Tom Roper, Steven Abram and Karen Schneider (via ALA TechSource), to the bouncy, zippy, web-culture vlog MobuzzTV.
Here Mobuzzer Karina Stenquist explains the disconnect between Middlesex and The Passion of Jesus Christ: Fifty reasons he came to die. Karina did something on us before and—I'm sorry—she's great.
I love everything people are saying about it, with big discussions here and on various blogs, mosty people strive to find the oddest, funniest unsuggestions. My favorite blog discussion came off a short note by "Fontana Labs" (a philosophy professor?) on Unfogged, and is now past 120 comments. Much of it came from the proposal:
Here Mobuzzer Karina Stenquist explains the disconnect between Middlesex and The Passion of Jesus Christ: Fifty reasons he came to die. Karina did something on us before and—I'm sorry—she's great.
I love everything people are saying about it, with big discussions here and on various blogs, mosty people strive to find the oddest, funniest unsuggestions. My favorite blog discussion came off a short note by "Fontana Labs" (a philosophy professor?) on Unfogged, and is now past 120 comments. Much of it came from the proposal:
"There's got to be some ultimately evil book out that that will generate the ideal library. Not The Bridges of Madison County, but like that."Speculation ensues, with the unsuggestions for Who moved my Cheese? much praised. I enjoyed this exchange:
"Sadly for Unfogged (but perhaps good for Western civilization) Who Moved My Cheese? For Kids, as perfectly soul-deadening a title as I've ever encountered, isn't owned by enough LibraryThing users to produce results. ..."
"Who Moved My Cheese? For Kids. Oh my God, my soul just broke into three thousand tiny wretched pieces."Hey, I didn't say it. De gustibus...
posted by Tim at 2:11 PM
27 Comments:
Oddest, funniest UnSuggestion I found was this:
Pump in Alex Comfort's "The Joy of Sex", and most of the top 10 contains books by Chuck Palahniuk.
Even better - "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" returns a book called "Don't Waste Your Life" as the top UnSuggestion. No idea what it's about, but such a fitting title. :)
I do wish you'd reduce the number of copies required before unsuggestions are generated. I understand you don't want it too low, but how about 50?
You also got a suggestion on one of the Business 2.0 blogs:
http://blogs.business2.com/softgadgets/2006/11/library_things_.html
Oops, I meant "mention" not "suggestion".
So, I looked at unsuggestions for Rita Mae Brown's Bingo, and there was The Little Prince at #39. "But I own that!", I said to myself, "why does it say 'expected 4.7, found 0'?"
It's because 490 people have the book listed without an author!!
(At #5 we find The Screwtape letters ; with, Screwtape proposes a toast, but I own each of those, just separately, not in one volume.)
On the other hand, Chuck Palahniuk and The Purpose-Driven Life show up, as they do with just about every book of mine I've tried here!
The Little Prince thing is odd. There must be some odd Amazon data in the mix. For that and the other one, I need to facilitate work-combinations across author boundaries.
The Screwtape example brings up that our combining process should have more options, like "part of a series," "contains," etc. It's all planned, but not coming down the pike tomorrow.
Can you point me to an explanation about what "expected 15.5, found 0" means? Thank you :-)
Well, it means that given the pool of works owned by people who own X, Y copies of the work could be expected.
For example, imagine a book is owned by 2000 people who have a total of 720,000 books. That's 10% of the books in the system overall (7.2 million). All things being equal that 720,000 books should contain 10% of the copies of every work in the system. So, for example if 1,000 copies of a novel are held overall, one would "expect" 100 in the pool.
Does that make sense?
Yes, thank you :-)
(The bigger the gap between 'expected' and 'found', the higher up on the UnSuggester list the title appears).
The anti "Wuthering Heights" is half Christian, half programming and AI.
The anti- "Poor Mouth" (Flann O'Brien) includes "Atlas Shrugged, Friedman's "The World is Flat", and "The Purpose Driven Life" in the top 8. This makes it the best book in the world.
But who would have expected the Harry Potter Box Set ne the anti-"Lake Wobegon Days".
I've got more here:
http://www.idiocentrism.com/unsuggest.htm
I've taken a brief, more personal look at the UnSuggester than has idiocentrism - though some similar results are reached.
Something is wrong with the HP box set. I think it was a combination thing, happening DURING the query running.
John: Love your post, but what's up with your comments? Troll-alert!
Tim: Dr. Meat and I get along fine, but I wish he hadn't chosen that thread. It's an ongoing thing.
Oh. Well, online communication lacks for context, I suppose ;)
Many of the modern classics taught in public schools (Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, 1984) feature Christian texts in their negations. What could this mean?
Besides sex, drugs, fantasy, horror, romance and crime, Christians seem to avoid cynicism and social criticism.
By and large, though, when I look up serious non-fiction, the anti-books are pulp and chick lit (together with male chick lit).
"The Great Gatsby" and "To Kill a Mocjingbird" are required reading in many public secular high schools and I bet that's a big factor.
As you said.
The best selector for "serious lit" would be the "Left Behind" series, because it overlaps with Christian literature, pulp fiction (which most Christians don't read) and apparently even chick lit and male lifestyle books.
The "Left Behind" anti-books are like a liberal arts syllabus. The "Left Behind" pro-books list always starts with 2-4 other "Left Behind" books, and then goes on to other very similiar books by Frank Peretti and Jerry Jenkins. A small amount of more serious Christian literature such as Billy Graham's autobography or "The Purpose Driven Life" creeps into the top 20.
The anti-Dean Koontz is also good.
We need a name for this "male chicklit" - I'd like to suggest either "brolit" or, perhaps more precisely, "brofic"
Thoughts?
In running a handful of my science books through the unsuggester (there aren't all that many that exist in enough copies for it to work) it's rather striking how many times the words "girl" and "sister" and "diary" appear in the titles of the unsuggestions.
I thought "dorklit".
The programming book "ANSI Common Lisp" turns up quite a few good novels. If I were a programmer I'd be offended at the computer's assumption that I had never read "the Wind in the willows" as a kid.
- tripleblessings
*anxiously awaits the ThingUnsuggest API*
Re: *anxiously awaits the ThingUnsuggest API. I can do one, and it's not like we'd be sacrificing *valuable* data. Does anyone really want it?
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