Kinread.ca - interactive site that lets you plot your literary tastes against 703K other users.
Data source: UCSD Goodreads dataset (Wan & McAuley), ~703K users, ~103M ratings. Tools: Python — weighted Pearson correlation for the similarity graph, Louvain community detection (~600 communities/reader clusters with an additional 505 sub communities/clusters for the larger groups), UMAP for the 2D projection. Rendered with deck.gl (WebGL) — ScatterplotLayer for the ~703K reader points, TextLayer for the cluster labels.
I just finished this website last week! Each dot is one reader, fully zoomed out they blend together into a mass of colours so I’ve included some progressive zoom shots to show how it looks close up. Distance roughly means taste similarity (though distance in the projection is non-linear and becomes increasingly distorted the farther you go).
The big central multicoloured mass is the connected mainstream of English-language fiction, and the isolated islands are genuinely separate reading communities (the teal blob on the far left that’s detached from the main plot is a cluster of readers of Arabic-language titles, who share almost no books with the main cohort for example).
Background: I've been wanting to build this for ten years — my first version was an Excel VBA scraper making scatter plots of rating alignment between Goodreads profiles. This year I finally built it properly: kinread.ca lets you paste your own library export (Goodreads, StoryGraph, or LibraryThing) and see where you land on this map, it also serves book recommendations based on what other readers who read and rate things like you enjoyed. It’s different from other recommendation algorithms because it doesn’t just serve books that are similar to what you’ve read previously, but it takes into account all the books you’ve ever rated— not just the ones you loved but also the ones you hated or were indifferent about. Also; it works really well for people with eclectic tastes— if you love non-fiction books about quantum computing, 18th century French poetry and books about time traveling wizards while eschewing pop psych books or stories about teenage vampires then it’ll find the people with similar readings tastes to you (if they exist).