Asimov's Foundation -- turning a data story into an NFT artwork

TL;DR

This paper combines data science, network visualization, and AI to analyze Asimov's Foundation series, creating an NFT artwork from the novel's semantic network, and uses GPT-3 to generate parts of the paper.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interdisciplinary approach by transforming literary data into digital art and integrates AI-generated content to pay homage to Asimov's themes.

Findings

Semantic network visualization of the novels

NFT artwork minted from the network visualization

AI-generated text complements the analysis

Abstract

In this piece, we overview Isaac Asimov's most iconic work, the Foundation series, with two primary goals: to provide quantitative insights about the novels and bridge data science with digital art. First, we rely on data science and text processing tools to describe certain properties of Asimov's career and the novels, focusing on the different worlds in Asimov's universe. Then we transform the books' texts into a network centered around Asimov's planets and their semantic context. Finally, we introduce the world of crypto art and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by transforming the visualized network into a high-end digital piece of art minted as an NFT. Additionally, to pay tribute to Asimov's devotion to robotics and artificial intelligence, we use OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) to draft several paragraphs of this paper.