{"id":789,"date":"2013-09-29T11:14:22","date_gmt":"2013-09-29T10:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shardcore.org\/shardpress\/?p=789"},"modified":"2013-09-29T11:14:22","modified_gmt":"2013-09-29T10:14:22","slug":"klfbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shardcore.org\/spx\/2013\/09\/29\/klfbook\/","title":{"rendered":"@klfbook"},"content":{"rendered":"

How do you model the mind of a book? This was the question John Higgs<\/a> and I were discussing in the pub one night. John’s excellent book The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds<\/a> was due to be released in paperback, and we wanted to see if we could make it ‘come alive’ on the internet in some way. I’d already run a generative radio station for 23 days for the initial release, Radio Eris<\/a>, and wanted to do something different.
\nJohn gave me a copy of the book in it’s print-ready format, and I set about pondering how best to extract the tangled web of people and events inside it, with a view to creating some sort of interrogatable representation, that could then be shoe-horned into the internet in some way. I set about creating a program to extract the named entities in the book, all the people mentioned, and their position inside the text. From this skeleton, I looked at each entity and examined which other entities were mentioned nearby in the text. This, to my surprise, gave me a model of interconnections which bears a remarkable likeness to the ideas contained in the book.
\nThe view below picks 3 names from the book at random – if you click on them, their relative relationships are revealed. Beware, some nodes like Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty are (unsurprisingly) highly connected.
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