The Average Novel

Allison Parrish

This repository contains the source code for my NaNoGenMo 2017 project. I made a list of all the books labelled "fiction" in Project Gutenberg and averaged them together using word vectors.

Here's the result.

This Jupyter notebook explains the process in more detail. (Unfortunately, you won't be able to totally replicate the process of generating the novel from this code alone, since the gutenfetch module depends on the particular arrangement of files in my own Project Gutenberg disk. But hopefully it's enough to get the gist across!)

Vectors and corpora

To make this project, I trained 100d word vectors from a corpus of several thousand novels (actually: texts labelled as being fiction) in Project Gutenberg. You can download those vectors here (~200MB file).

I can also share the corpus of sentences from these novels that I used to train the vectors, but that file is much larger and more cumbersome---for now, please get in touch with me directly for access.

The Project Gutenberg files I used for this project were taken from Gutenberg-tar.

Acknowledgements and licenses

The text of The Average Novel is made available under a CC BY 4.0 license.

The file 47000_metadata.json, containing metadata on the texts in Project Gutenberg, was produced by Leonard Richardson

The file gutenberg.py, used for pre-processing the texts, is taken from this repository.

Otherwise the code in this repository has the following license:

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2017 Allison Parrish

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