WonderCat, a Discovery Tool

Some people travel for healing and some for adventure. Some want to experience a different culture and some just want to kick back and relax. The same is true for reading.

You might have come into this class expecting that I would have a reading list for us to follow, but there’s no assigned reading in this course. If you like the experience of reading the same thing as others (I certainly do), you could decide to read the same thing as a group of classmates. But this course is designed so each of you can decide what you’ll read for each assignment.

My students have told me that it can be challenging to make these decisions. To help with this, I’ve collaborated with some colleagues to build WonderCat, a constantly growing database of story experiences.

WonderCat can help you discover texts according to the narrative technologies, experiences, and benefits others have reported having with them. Certain technologies, like the empathy booster, calm my anxiety and others, like satire, help me laugh at myself. You are not me, of course, and our goal in designing the tool is to help you find stories that work best for you.

If you’ve read a story in WonderCat, check out who read it and what else they’ve read. WonderCat is a database, not a recommender system, but you’ll probably be familiar with this approach powering the recommendations you get in streaming services and online shopping sites (“customers also bought…”). Of course, on those sites, the recommendations are computed with proprietary algorithms drawing on your behavior and demographic data. Those algorithms are built around assumptions about your identity and can’t know your actual experiences (if you want to think more about how algorithms use your behavior and demographics to make predictions about you, check if you have a Google adsense profile). I think it’s better to have some agency in these choices and so I’m quite proud that WonderCat is a database that you can search, not a recommender system making predictions about what you will like.