I am a scientist hunting for variants in our genome that cause rare diseases and an avid reader in my spare time. In this project I hoped to use the tools from my work in genetics on literature, to improve my understanding of them and hopefully find some good books to read.
I started in November 2016, hoping to make a physical clock as a Christmas present. Around half a year later I managed to track down the final minutes; the closer to completion, the harder the missing minutes are to find. Quotes covering the bitter watches of the night are very rare.
As for the physical clock, I looked to use a Raspberry Pi and an E Ink screen (inspired by this autocomplete poetry installation). However, I could not find an E Ink screen I was happy with. Instead I made this website and I used the Raspberry Pi to make a Twitter bot for @literaryclock to share my efforts with everyone.
To make a literary clock, we need at least 1440 quotes to cover every minute of the day. When collecting these quotes I used several methods: crowdsourcing, reading through my personal library, the Project Gutenberg collection and other online amassments of books. To search through books for times, I found different collections of books, converted them to machine-readable files and used distributed computing to read through all of them to find the times.
The following posts will describe my efforts to make a literary clock, from the less technical crowdsourcing to using Python and Spark for dealing with up to 50,000 books at a time.
I will also detail how I made this website and Twitter bot, having pieced them together from several different tutorials, to have a constantly ticking clock. Hopefully these will prove beneficial to anyone else trying out a bespoke project. This has been very much a labour of love in my spare time, so there may be a few errors out there.
Otherwise I hope you find these posts helpful and the clock entertaining. Happy reading, in more ways than one!