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Genres by hierarchy!
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Cait
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Apr 05, 2011 05:24PM
Okay, you guys have no idea how much it was bugging me to only have a flat view of the genres. It was bugging me so much that I copied and pasted and made my very own hierarchical view, which took several days and is probably already out of date, but which has already proved useful as I sorted the things I found. Also, there are far fewer singleton genres or compound genres than I feared!
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Oh waow, that's so much easier to check things! Like strange inconsistencies...Why is Suisse a subgenre of French literature, when other countries get are on the same level. Or if it is on language, shouldn't there be a Duthc Literature with subgenre Flemish, and a subgenre Wallon under French instead of the currently used Belgian? (also without Literature)
I totally want an official page like this for librarian purposes!
Impressive!My question is what is the difference between high & low fantasy? Just as a matter of interest.
And my other question would be where would you put all those spy novels? Suspense maybe?
Sandra wrote: "Impressive!My question is what is the difference between high & low fantasy? Just as a matter of interest.
And my other question would be where would you put all those spy novels? Suspense maybe?"
High Fantasy, also epic Fantasy is huge in scope, about the battle between good and evil, and very often involves quests and the likes. Think Tolkien. Longer elaborate explenation here
I put Spy under Thriller as I was working through the genres, actually -- must not have updated the hierarchy as I did it. There's no way I can keep that up to date, sadly! :)
Cait wrote: "Okay, you guys have no idea how much it was bugging me to only have a flat view of the genres. It was bugging me so much that I copied and pasted and made my very own hierarchical view, which took ..."Well done Cait!
I agree Swiss should not be under French; for one thing, some of the books under Swiss (under French) are written in German. Also, it would tend to piss off the Italian Swiss and German Swiss who certainly don't consider themselves French.
Sandra wrote: "Impressive!My question is what is the difference between high & low fantasy? Just as a matter of interest."
Generally, high fantasy is set in alternate worlds while low fantasy is set in the (more-or-less) real world. People tend to mix-up high fantasy with epic fantasy (as in the Wikipedia link above), which leads to the idea that high fantasy is huge in scope while low fantasy is more minor in scope, but that's not really where the primary definitions come from.
Inspired by Cait, I spent entirely too much time this afternoon working on a program which would automatically build a webpage of the hierarchical structure of the Goodreads genres. Because it's automated it obviously doesn't have any of Cait's annotations.Originally I was going to make it available to everyone, but since it takes about 10 minutes to run and I don't want to kill GR servers by having a bunch of people running it to scrape the 650+ genre pages for the data necessary to build the hierarchy, I figure I'll just plan on running it and updating the page maybe once or twice a week until Goodreads creates their own internal hierarchy.
Edit: @#$%!#$% Just discovered an error in which the links are all wrong. Will fix and reupload in hopefully only 10 minutes or so.
Ahh...was able to fix more quickly using a find-replace so don't have to wait for the fixed code to finish.
Impressive. I had no idea we had so many genres.If and when Goodreads adds a hierarchy, I'd love to see it be collapsible so that you can ignore genres that are not relevant at a given moment. Like collapsing non-fiction when you're focusing on fiction.
Well done Michael! Very useful and interesting.
