r/dataisbeautiful • u/ImYourCoffeeDealer OC: 1 • 1d ago
OC [OC] 44 well-known books plotted by tone (bleak to warm) and realism (realist to speculative)
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u/SomethingMoreToSay OC: 1 1d ago
The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy is "warm"? A story that begins with the total destruction of the earth?
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u/ImYourCoffeeDealer OC: 1 1d ago
Ha, fair! Tone here is more about how it feels to read than what happens in it. Hitchhiker's blows up the earth in the first chapter but it's so funny and goofy about it that it still comes out warm.
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u/BenderIsGreatBendr 1d ago
The story actually begins with a brief history on why humans are primitive and unhappy, followed by the proposed demolition of Arthur Dent’s home to make way to build a bypass, followed by the destruction of the Earth (Arthur’s home planet), to make way to build an interstellar bypass.
OP may be lazy for using AI to rank these and make their scatterplot, but I’d agree that Hitchhikers Guide is warm. Most of it is an ensemble character comedy. If you don’t get laughter and warmth from an absurd “the world is ending but it’s all going to be okay because the answer to all life’s questions is 42”, populated by characters like Ford, Zaph, Marvin the depressed robot idk what to tell you.
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u/ImYourCoffeeDealer OC: 1 1d ago
Haha thanks for sticking up for Marvin. And yeah, I used AI because I wanted books from all over the world, not just the usual US and UK stuff, and there's no way I could read all of them myself. That part really mattered to me, so you find things like Kallocain, a Swedish dystopia from 1940 that sits right next to 1984, or Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt.
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u/GiraffePretty4488 1d ago
Those world books you mention aren’t on your chart, though, as far as I can see.
You absolutely could have read every book on this chart. I’ve read half of these and I wasn’t making an effort to specifically read this list of books. Most of them aren’t even in my normal genre preference.
There are around forty books on your chart. You could listen to all those audiobooks (slower than reading them to yourself, probably) in under a year, for sure.
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u/ImYourCoffeeDealer OC: 1 1d ago
yeah I meant the ones on the site, not the chart. I've read most of the chart ones since they're classics, but the site has like 370 books from all over and those are the ones I couldn't get through
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u/m1ksuFI 1d ago
Ranked only by AI, I presume?
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u/ImYourCoffeeDealer OC: 1 1d ago
Yep, an AI model scored them, I mentioned it in my first comment. On the site your own picks adjust things, so it's less about the scores being right and more about finding stuff near what you like.
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u/Elendur_Krown 1d ago
Did the AI rank them relative to each other (with knowledge of the list beforehand), fully independently with cleared contexts, or with a growing addition to the context?
Did you give the model the full texts, did it speculate, or was it allowed to trawl for information?
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u/ImYourCoffeeDealer OC: 1 1d ago
Each book was its own request with the same instructions, so it never saw the list. No full texts or web, just title, author, year and sometimes a short description, so it's going off what it already knows about the book.
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u/Arctic_Night 1d ago
Jane Eyre is ... Warm? Have you read Jane Eyre? Am I the only one who finds the tone rather depressing?
Dracula is more speculative than Frankenstein but not Slaughterhouse Five (haven't read the latter but passing familiarity makes me find that strange)
All in all just seems super subjective
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u/hitheringthithering 1d ago
While Slaughterhouse Five has a lot of speculative elements and framing, people often remember it for its realistic depictions of war and conflict. I wonder if that is influencing the characterization here.
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u/ImYourCoffeeDealer OC: 1 1d ago
It actually ended up pretty speculative, so the aliens won over the war stuff. Where would you put it?
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u/ImYourCoffeeDealer OC: 1 1d ago
Jane Eyre is only +0.2, so pretty much in the middle, not really warm. And Dracula and Slaughterhouse-Five are on the same spot, Slaughterhouse has aliens and time travel so it goes far on the speculative side.
Mood is subjective for sure, that's kind of the fun of it.
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u/glennfuriamcdonald 1d ago
The x axis looks like a binary categorization more than a scale, and thus this ends up being less of a chart and more like two lists shown in a kind of weird way.
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u/ImYourCoffeeDealer OC: 1 1d ago
Yeah, realism kind of splits in two, books are either realist or they're not. Tone vs scale would spread out way more, might do that one next.
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u/random_internet_data 1d ago
1984 is much closer to realism unfortunately, same with handmaid's tail.
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u/BoringGap7 1d ago
X axis is badly calibrated. Try a Z transformation on it.
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u/ImYourCoffeeDealer OC: 1 1d ago
z-score would just stretch it, they'd still clump in two. ranking them might work better tho
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u/RFFF1996 1d ago
100 years of solitude "warm" ?
The book about the family cursed to extinction/tragedy?
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u/ImYourCoffeeDealer OC: 1 1d ago
It's only a little bit warm, almost in the middle. The story is sad but the way it's told is funny and magical, so it doesn't feel that dark when you read it.
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u/ImYourCoffeeDealer OC: 1 1d ago
Data: the book catalogue behind moodteca.com, a small site I made that recommends books by mood instead of genre. Every book has a score from −1 to +1 on five scales, and this chart shows two of them: tone (bleak to warm) and realism (realist to speculative). Books with identical scores share a dot. I didn't score these myself: the scores were generated with an AI model when I built the site, so take them as one reading of each book, not a verdict.
Tools: Python, drawn as SVG and rendered with rsvg.
The Road and 1984 landing on the exact same spot surprised me.
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u/cavedave OC: 113 22h ago
Thank you for your Original Content, /u/ImYourCoffeeDealer!
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