STONYBOOK: A System and Resource for Large-Scale Analysis of Novels

TL;DR

This paper introduces STONYBOOK, a comprehensive system and resource for large-scale analysis of novels, including an annotation pipeline, a large collection of annotated novels, and tools for aggregate literary analysis.

Contribution

It provides an open-source NLP pipeline, a large annotated novel dataset, and a web interface for large-scale literary analysis, enabling new research opportunities.

Findings

Visualizations of character interactions and occurrences

Analysis of vocabulary and readability metrics

Comparison of similar books based on annotations

Abstract

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.