Side Projects :: Fringy stuff.

Mikael Onsjö and I made a draft version of a data visualization oriented book about the Star Trek television franchise. The visualizations are based largely on data that we painstakingly compiled about the characters, literary themes, aliens, and other miscellaneous stuff. However, it is proving to be quite a nuisance to get the thing published. A preview can be downloaded just below.

Book Preview

• Star Trek by the Data preview [ pdf link ]

Theme Ontology is a project about defining literary themes in a hopefully systematic way and tagging stories with them.

Related Links

• Theme Ontology website [ link ]
• Theme Ontology GitHub repository [ GitHub link ]
• The R package stoRy [ CRAN link ]
• A Knowledge-based Filtering Story Recommender System for Theme Lovers with an Application to the Star Trek Television Franchise by Paul Sheridan, M. Onsjö, S. Jimenez, G. Dueñas [ arXiv link ]
• Theme Enrichment Analysis: A Statistical Test for Identifying Significantly Enriched Themes in a List of Stories with an Application to the Star Trek Television Franchise by M. Onsjö, Paul Sheridan [ arXiv link ]

I ran a blog, which is now on hiatus, with the intention of sharing various stories that I collected over the years concerning people from the ancient world whose names have been preserved on account of the curious or otherwise interesting circumstances surrounding their lives. These people are sometimes historical, sometimes mythological, and sometimes divine. There is the common shepard Philitis, after whom the Egyptians named the Pyramids of Giza; there is Arion, the pop music sensation of the 7th century BC, who is said to have traveled the Mediterranean on the back of a dolphin; and there is Hyakinthos, who was the first gay guy according to Apollodorus. Also I am not above relating such curiosities as Herodotus' account of how to catch a crocodile.

Blog Link

• www.anecdotesfromantiquity.net

Selected Posts

• A Customer Complaint Letter from Mesopotamia
• A Rape on the Satyr Islands
• The Sacred Chickens of Rome
• In Defence of King Candaules
• Can Somebody Kindly Name this Painter of Exceptional Talent?
• Selected Anecdotes by Valerius Maximus
• The Locust Plagues of Mount Sipylus
• The Table of the Sun
• The Inessential Guide to Herodotus
• Ferdowsi and the Three Celebrated Poets
• A New Zaleucus to Rebuke us in the Online Age
• Saint Gregory the Great’s Sad Tale
• Herodotus on How to Catch a Nile Crocodile
• How to Make Kumis the Scythian Way
• Thamyris: The First Gay Guy According to Apollodorus
• Philitis and the Great Pyramid