About

This website, the National Novel Generation Month Catalog, is a collection of metadata about the novels produced for each year's NaNoGenMo event, shared here to make it easier to find, study, and share these works. For each of the 473 novels currently recorded here, you'll find a brief excerpt, a few images, and some analytical data like word count.

Please note: the novels themselves are not hosted here for reasons of copyright, but each entry includes a link to where its author shared a copy of the generated novel, usually in Github.

How to Use this Site

Browsing Items

This software running this site, Omeka S, is designed for cultural institutations to share information about their collections. This prupose informs the logic and some of the terminology on this site. Each novel, for example, is an "item", and these items are organized into "item collections" for each year of NaNoGenMo. Creators of novels are also "items", which are "linked" with the works they are credited with in the database. An index of these organizational schemas -- yearly collections and creator-linked resources -- can be accessed via the "Browse" navigation menu.

Tags

Tags are another way of finding similar novels. These are a user-generated folksonomy of keywords identifying common elements among different works. To add tags for any item, type them into the form at the bottom of the page as you are viewing.

Metadata

Some forms of metadata also include an option to browse for other works that share the same value. For example, while viewing the page for lilinx's An Even More Violent Homer, the "Language" value (FR) is followed by a link to browse other items that also have the value "FR" set for their language. The same option exists to find works that use the same programming language.

Search and advanced search

The search box in the navigation bar of this site allows for simple text searches, which will match a result on any field containing that string.  On a simple search result page, the "Advanced Search" option makes it possible to search for results based on specific metadata elements, including ranged searches for those values which are stored as numeric values (date, word count, sentence count, and compression percentage).

The API

The data of this website is also available in JSON form via a REST API. For information about this service, consult the relevant Omeka S documentation. 

The endpoint for API calls is https://nngm.botstudies.org/s/n/.

Credits and Acknowledgements

The data in this site was compiled by the site administrator, Zach Whalen, but it builds off some work already undertaken in the NaNoGenMo community -- particularly by Michael Paulukonis, Chris Pressey, hugovk and John Ohno -- to  document the coding languages and composition techniques being used in each year's event. 

Thanks also to Eli Berg-Maas for the suggestion that comparing compression levels of different work can quickly reveal important similarities and differences.