STONYBOOK: A System and Resource for Large-Scale Analysis of Novels
Charuta Pethe Allen Kim Rajesh Prabhakar Tanzir Pial Steven Skiena
Books have historically been the primary mechanism through which narratives
are transmitted. We have developed a collection of resources for the
large-scale analysis of novels, including: (1) an open source end-to-end NLP
analysis pipeline for the annotation of novels into a standard XML format, (2)
a collection of 49,207 distinct cleaned and annotated novels, and (3) a
database with an associated web interface for the large-scale aggregate
analysis of these literary works. We describe the major functionalities
provided in the annotation system along with their utilities. We present
samples of analysis artifacts from our website, such as visualizations of
character occurrences and interactions, similar books, representative
vocabulary, part of speech statistics, and readability metrics. We also
describe the use of the annotated format in qualitative and quantitative
analysis across large corpora of novels.