Visualizing the text of Philip Pullman's trilogy "His Dark Materials"

Digital technologies have repeatedly redefined the paper world of books. Digital printing has overhauled the publishing processes, and the internet has revolutionized the way audiences and authors connect to share their enthusiasm and criticism. Now the digitization of books themselves, either for searching, browsing, and reading on a computer screen through services like Google Books, or for reading on dedicated devices like Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, or Apple's iPad are threatening the established order. For this project we side-step these issues and concentrate instead on how the analytical power and display capabilities of computers may be used to enhance our understanding of book texts. We use the term "book texts" rather than the word "books" as we are not trying to build computer systems that might understand books, but rather we use the computer's ability to treat books as an abstract sequence of words as the starting point for new analytical tools.