Finding Aids for the Unread

In the Republic of the Imagination, Azar Nafisi champions reading as a way to open ourselves to deepen empathy and entice our curiosity. Inspired, I am developing ways of documenting and visualizing not only what I read, but also what caused me to read using linked open data. Through a custom Jekyll plugin, RDFa triples are extracted from my reading notes text files. The plugin writes JSON-LD triplets, which are then used as input for a variety of visualizations. Tracing reading reveals the breadths and depths of interconnected themes among works that, initially, are connected simply because I noticed one influenced me to read the other. The visualizations enable movement between big-picture views of the corpus and close-readings of individual books and can reveal adjacent possibilities in themes, readings, as well as shape questions that may be currently unarticulated. Influenced by feminist interface design, this talk will focus on the design and creation of visualizations – as finding aids, as maps into the landscape of a personal corpus.