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Visualizing How Books Reference Each Other Across 3k Years

Details

External ID
46978805
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Visualizing How Books Reference Each Other Across 3k Years
Website domain
github.io
Launched
Feb. 11, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
5
Upvotes percentile
0.10512129380053908
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

There are two parts for this project:1) The LLM-powered pipeline to extract citations (books + authors) from books and resolve them using both Wikipedia and Goodreads with offline copies I have. The result is data associating Books/Authors to other Books/Authors with accurate bibliographical information spanning centuries.2) A WebGPU + D3.js powered visualization tool written by Claude Code so I'm able to deal with all this data on the browser on a more or less comfortable experience for the viewer.I spent some months on a off with this project, and definitely the most challenging part was dealing with accurate bibliographical information across centuries, with original publication dates and etc. For that I wrote what is now a very complex pipeline with LLMs (I used DeepSeek V3.2) wired on offline Goodreads and Wikipedia databases + a fallback that actually uses the internet.Hope you enjoy it! Open to suggestions on how to improve the system :)Code is here: https://github.com/ThiagoLira/bookgraph-revisited

Enrichment

Theme
browser utilities and bookmark managers
Vertical
Media & entertainment
Function
Analytics & BI
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
visualization of historical book references
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial Building the interactive 3D/timeline frontend is straightforward, but processing centuries of book texts and resolving entity citations against Wikipedia/Goodreads offline dumps requires serious data pipeline work.

What it would actually take: The backend requires an ingestion and OCR pipeline across thousands of historical texts, NER extraction using local or API-based LLMs, and an entity disambiguation engine matching against Wikidata and Goodreads dumps. The frontend requires a WebGL/Three.js or D3 force-directed 3D network visualization optimized for high-density historical graph rendering. A developer needs strong graph data modeling and large-scale data engineering experience.

Discussion

3 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: DeepSeek V3.2

Concerns raised: High token costs for processing large datasets, Data accuracy issues (incorrect historical dating)

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 146 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #138 of 147 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 100 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

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