Imagine walking down a city street and feeling that familiar buzz of a push notification. But instead of it being a notification on Twitter or a restaurant recommendation, it's a beautiful passage from a work of literature with a tie to that place.
In Paris, it could be walking past Cafe de Flore and receiving a sample from James Baldwin or Richard Wright. In Washington, DC, it could be a sample of an Alex Cross novel. In Japan, it could be one of Miyuke Miyabe's mystery novels. In Chicago, it could be a bit from Devil in the White City.
The core idea is to inject a little bit of romance and discoverability into books. Not only is the reader given a beautiful prompt to reflect upon (contributing to the mental environment) but it also is a wondrous reminder that literature lives wherever we are.
LitCity consists of
- a Django app to manage book, quote, and location data
- a script to automatically extract and geolocate place names from text
- a script that fetches and stores book quotes from Goodreads
To set up, do the usual Django dance:
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python manage.py migrate
$ python manage.py createsuperuser
To start the server:
$ python manage.py runserver
To create/edit data from the admin interface, go to /admin.
To run the scripts that add data:
$ python manage.py import_locations {book_id} {csvfile}
$ python manage.py get_top_quotes {book_title} # fetches from Goodreads API
import_locations takes a CSV file with (label, latitude, longitude) columns.
get_top_quotes requires the title of a Goodreads book.
- Liam Andrew (mailbackwards)
- Helen Bailey (hakbailey)
- Phil Polefrone (prpole)
- Olimpia Estela (olimpiaestela)
- Navraj Narula (navierula)
- Danish Shabbir