A while ago I was doing a mockup of an HP Lovecraft full text index for a MLIS class. After the brainstorming and initial design process I decided I was just building another version one of the many Lovecraft repositories already available online.
However, I’m bringing the project back to the todo list after learning some more about the Stanford NLP Link Parser and Carnegie Mellon Parser And the text analysis possibilities of R and Python. It would certainly be interesting to experiment with the fantastic proper nouns and eloquent sentences. Just imagine the opening sentence of “Call of the Cthululu” being processed by the link software… (It turns out it does a great job.)
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
I have a working version of a link parser on a server at Rutgers and I’ll post again as soon as I’ve got it accessible via a browser.
The pdfs of the old web mockups and original paper are linked below.