A short update for short stories. The Robot Book Club met this week to read TOR.com Short Stories.

Short stories have proven harder to analize than novels. The short format seems to favor a more artful writing style that befuddles the robots.

But there's an interesting value in navigating those stories as a set. Especially these ones: you can read them online at TOR.com!

The Robot Book Club met to read Jurassic Park.

We learned how hard NER is at scale. Anything other than perfect precision in your model really has an impact when trying to summarize hundreds of pages.

Remember when Crichton put the source code of Dennis Nedry's computer virus in the book? Yeah, state of the art NER thinks that's someone's name. Also a name: all of the Dino DNA sequences.

View everything the robots understood here. Next time we'll read The Lost World and try to tune the NER and character timeline builder.

Robot Book Club is an excuse to have a bit of fun at the intersection of literature and computation.

What can we learn from the text all around us? What trends appear at volume and over time?

If you have ideas or requests, I'm all ears. You can find me at @edwardbenson on Twitter.