Fic directory, searchable by geographical placename?
I have this idea for a geographically-based fic directory, and I want to chatter about it a little, and see what you guys think.
One thing that is sure to get me to click on a story every time, regardless of any other header information, is when it's set in a place where I've lived -- or sometimes, even just visited. And I bet I'm not alone in that. In SPN, for example, canon has given us this great road-trip premise, and comms like spn_50states play with that. It's so much fun to find a story written about a place the author knows and loves, and to get that "omg-I-know-that-place-too!" thrill.
So wouldn't it be cool to search for fics by setting? I'm thinking it would look something like this:
(This is a US map only because that's where I am, and where Supernatural is set, but it could of course work anywhere in the world.) Except it might be less useful in some fandoms than in others... like where the vast majority of fics are set in Atlantis or Hogwarts.
I'm not talking about an archive, but just a directory, with links pointing to wherever the fics may live. The way I see it, it would consist of these parts:
1. Link collection
There are several possibilities for where the links would come from. One possibility is that there could be a database managed by one (or a few) Persons in Charge. Here are a couple examples of how fans did something like this, using the Google Maps API to build fannish maps. Not exactly what we're talking about here, but maps of canon locations: The Geography of Seinfeld, and The Ultimate Interactive Google Maps Guide to Ghostbusters. (I made a big list of these fannish maps, if you're interested in more.)
But. Those projects have such a small number of links, compared to the potential THOUSANDS that we're talking about here, that I think it's going to have to be a collaborative project. I don't see how a small group of people could catch all the links and code them all, especially seeing as the list would be constantly growing. So from here on out I'm going to focus on tools that use social bookmarking. Authors could tag their own stories, or their readers could. (And I keep saying "stories", but this could include any type of fanwork.)
Fanworks Finder might be a good source for links? I don't know much about it. And of course del.icio.us is a definite possibility. There are already some immense collections of fanworks there, including every fic that's ever appeared in spnnewsletter, tagged by black_samvara (over 17,000 links, currently).
2. Geotagging
Geotagging means adding geographical information to a thing. A lot of people geotag their Flickr photos, and some people geotag their blog posts. The LJ metadata "Location" field does this, kinda -- only nobody uses it like we're "supposed to," heh.
Here's a MAKE article on how to geotag del.icio.us bookmarks. It's a couple years old, so some of the instructions would be slightly different now -- for one thing, Google Maps has expanded, so Google Earth is no longer a requirement, I believe. Basically it involves tagging a bookmark with three terms: "geotagged", "geo:lat=###", and "geo:long=###"
But I think it might not be necessary to tag every link by hand, because geotagging software exists now. The RSS to GeoRSS Converter at GeoNames.org will read the regular language of an rss feed, search for words it recognizes as place names, look up the coordinates, and then geotag the feed. As an example, here's the geotagged version of an rss feed that I plugged in, (which happens to be for the del.icio.us tag "dogs"). As you can imagine, it gets confused sometimes -- is it Buffalo or a buffalo? -- but still. Really cool, right?
I'm not sure this would be good for this project as-is, though, for two reasons: One, it converts only the last 20 entries in the feed, which would be no good unless we were somehow capturing and storing each converted feed as it came in. Because I'm not looking to map just the 20 most recent fics; I'm looking to map THEM ALL, yes? The second issue is the same issue that exists for any tool outside fandom: there's no telling how data will be used once it's put into somebody else's service. I am not interested in exposing fans to outside scrutiny which they themselves did not invite.
3. Plotting
I think the map plotting may actually be the easiest part. There seems to be lots of ways to go about it.
Here's an example of how one person is plotting del.icio.us links: 3Dlicio.us. It's a mashup of del.icio.us and a virtual globe called Poly9 FreeEarth, but it differs from what we'd be doing in that it pulls geodata from the server where each link's website is located. We wouldn't care about that; we'd be basing our geodata from inside the text.
The GeoNames.org converted rss feeds can actually be displayed directly in Google Maps, just by copy/pasting the feed url into the search box. Here's my "dogs" example from above.
Yahoo Pipes is a tool for creating mashups out of different web services and rss feeds. It can do really simple combinations, or insanely complex ones. And the source is so pretty, it's like the Matrix squid bots. Here's a pipe that plots news stories on a map, using the GeoNames converter: GeoAnotated Reuters News. Pretty spiffy; maybe useful for combining data from various sources and displaying it all on the same map?
Some potential issues have occurred to me, in addition to what I've already talked about:
I first started thinking about this over a year ago, and the SPN Canon Map thing came about as a by-product of it. But I haven't thought about it in months, and I'm not going to go farther with actual development on it, so I just wanted to get it out of my head and out into the world. Maybe this is already being done somewhere I don't know about? (Please tell!) Or maybe this will plant a seed in the head of somebody interested in making it a reality.
One thing that is sure to get me to click on a story every time, regardless of any other header information, is when it's set in a place where I've lived -- or sometimes, even just visited. And I bet I'm not alone in that. In SPN, for example, canon has given us this great road-trip premise, and comms like spn_50states play with that. It's so much fun to find a story written about a place the author knows and loves, and to get that "omg-I-know-that-place-too!" thrill.
So wouldn't it be cool to search for fics by setting? I'm thinking it would look something like this:
(This is a US map only because that's where I am, and where Supernatural is set, but it could of course work anywhere in the world.) Except it might be less useful in some fandoms than in others... like where the vast majority of fics are set in Atlantis or Hogwarts.
I'm not talking about an archive, but just a directory, with links pointing to wherever the fics may live. The way I see it, it would consist of these parts:
- A collection of links to stories, with at least some header information included (title, author, fandom, genre, characters, summary, rating, warnings, length, etc.)
- A system for geotagging those story links (plugging in their latitude and longitude) -- either via a human or via geotagging software
- The user interface: a map with the geotagged links plotted
1. Link collection
There are several possibilities for where the links would come from. One possibility is that there could be a database managed by one (or a few) Persons in Charge. Here are a couple examples of how fans did something like this, using the Google Maps API to build fannish maps. Not exactly what we're talking about here, but maps of canon locations: The Geography of Seinfeld, and The Ultimate Interactive Google Maps Guide to Ghostbusters. (I made a big list of these fannish maps, if you're interested in more.)
But. Those projects have such a small number of links, compared to the potential THOUSANDS that we're talking about here, that I think it's going to have to be a collaborative project. I don't see how a small group of people could catch all the links and code them all, especially seeing as the list would be constantly growing. So from here on out I'm going to focus on tools that use social bookmarking. Authors could tag their own stories, or their readers could. (And I keep saying "stories", but this could include any type of fanwork.)
Fanworks Finder might be a good source for links? I don't know much about it. And of course del.icio.us is a definite possibility. There are already some immense collections of fanworks there, including every fic that's ever appeared in spnnewsletter, tagged by black_samvara (over 17,000 links, currently).
2. Geotagging
Geotagging means adding geographical information to a thing. A lot of people geotag their Flickr photos, and some people geotag their blog posts. The LJ metadata "Location" field does this, kinda -- only nobody uses it like we're "supposed to," heh.
Here's a MAKE article on how to geotag del.icio.us bookmarks. It's a couple years old, so some of the instructions would be slightly different now -- for one thing, Google Maps has expanded, so Google Earth is no longer a requirement, I believe. Basically it involves tagging a bookmark with three terms: "geotagged", "geo:lat=###", and "geo:long=###"
But I think it might not be necessary to tag every link by hand, because geotagging software exists now. The RSS to GeoRSS Converter at GeoNames.org will read the regular language of an rss feed, search for words it recognizes as place names, look up the coordinates, and then geotag the feed. As an example, here's the geotagged version of an rss feed that I plugged in, (which happens to be for the del.icio.us tag "dogs"). As you can imagine, it gets confused sometimes -- is it Buffalo or a buffalo? -- but still. Really cool, right?
I'm not sure this would be good for this project as-is, though, for two reasons: One, it converts only the last 20 entries in the feed, which would be no good unless we were somehow capturing and storing each converted feed as it came in. Because I'm not looking to map just the 20 most recent fics; I'm looking to map THEM ALL, yes? The second issue is the same issue that exists for any tool outside fandom: there's no telling how data will be used once it's put into somebody else's service. I am not interested in exposing fans to outside scrutiny which they themselves did not invite.
3. Plotting
I think the map plotting may actually be the easiest part. There seems to be lots of ways to go about it.
Here's an example of how one person is plotting del.icio.us links: 3Dlicio.us. It's a mashup of del.icio.us and a virtual globe called Poly9 FreeEarth, but it differs from what we'd be doing in that it pulls geodata from the server where each link's website is located. We wouldn't care about that; we'd be basing our geodata from inside the text.
The GeoNames.org converted rss feeds can actually be displayed directly in Google Maps, just by copy/pasting the feed url into the search box. Here's my "dogs" example from above.
Yahoo Pipes is a tool for creating mashups out of different web services and rss feeds. It can do really simple combinations, or insanely complex ones. And the source is so pretty, it's like the Matrix squid bots. Here's a pipe that plots news stories on a map, using the GeoNames converter: GeoAnotated Reuters News. Pretty spiffy; maybe useful for combining data from various sources and displaying it all on the same map?
Some potential issues have occurred to me, in addition to what I've already talked about:
- Some authors may be uncomfortable with their stories being linked in such a way. I'm not sure how to deal with that, but I am aware that it's a potentially sensitive issue.
- Some stories could conceivably be spoiled by geographical information.
- How to deal with ambiguous geography, unnamed towns or fictional towns. Maybe there could be a miscellaneous catch-all tag, or a few, for each state and/or region? "somewhere in South Dakota", "a fictional small town in Alabama", "in the Pacific Northwest", etc.
- Some stories span several locations. Need support for multiple geotags.
- It'd be nice to refine searches, like, say, "gen stories, more than 1000 words, set somewhere rural."
I first started thinking about this over a year ago, and the SPN Canon Map thing came about as a by-product of it. But I haven't thought about it in months, and I'm not going to go farther with actual development on it, so I just wanted to get it out of my head and out into the world. Maybe this is already being done somewhere I don't know about? (Please tell!) Or maybe this will plant a seed in the head of somebody interested in making it a reality.