“It all begins with a book.” So claims the promo video for Small Demons (see below), a new online venture that provides users with a concordance of all the real-world ephemera that appears in their favourite books.

The rubric on the Small Demons website describes the project in almost Borgesian terms:

Suppose someone took every meaningful detail from all the books you love. Every song mentioned, every person, every food or place or movie title. And what if they did that for all the books everyone else loves, too. The ones you’ve never heard of. Suddenly you’ve got a whole world of seemingly random people, places and things, all gathered in one place.

On Mediabistro’s Morning Media Menu, ex“Soft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash, the vice-president of content and community for Small Demons, explains how the site employs algorithms to catalogue and cross-reference mentions of people, songs, movies, restaurants, and other objects or places from the real world that are name-checked in books. The video uses Johann Strauss’s “The Blue Danube” as an example of Small Demon’s connective links. A reader who searches the title after finding it in Stephen King’s  The Shining is told that it also appears in Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke and Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart. (Whether this is meant to inspire you to seek out the other books is unclear.)

GalleyCat quotes Nash as saying that authors and others will have the ability to add context to the raw data the algorithms provide:

A computer can tell us how many times a song appears in a book. But it can’t tell us that it is the song that the couple dances to at the wedding reception or the song the jilted lover plays after being dumped. It can’t tell you the emotional resonance of it. So we are going to be relying on librarians and authors and gifted amateurs to come in and help us fix and add and weight and evaluate all the data we are generating. Individual authors will have that ability over an extended period of time.

It’s an intriguing idea, but Quillblog would like to note two things from the video below. Number one: that’s no way to handle a vinyl LP. And number two, if you’re using the site to gain insight into connections between objects in the real world, it should probably be noted that Tommy guns and Scotch aren’t the best pairing.