Very interesting, have you written this up anywhere? Curious if these add up to new historical knowledge or if they are more just conveying information we already knew. At a certain point as we gather more finds like this I suspect it will tip from the former to the latter.
I haven't written it up yet (maybe this weekend) but I did submit my solves to Cryptocellar, and I'm credited with them on the 1941 Messages List. The contents were varied but ranged from things like "700 field howitzer shells received" to "[so-and-so] admitted to hospital at [location]" to artillery targeting information. I don't suspect there's a lot of new historical value in these, but no doubt those more qualified to judge will look at all these new messages soon enough.
I’m currently at the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul. Was just thinking of this post ten minutes ago when I saw what the plaque described as a “humanoid-lion hybrid creature” from the Neo-Hittite empire in 9th century BCE. In fact lion-men of various sorts are everywhere in the more ancient parts of the museum. Makes me wonder about potential continuity, as distant as this is.
My daughters are growing up bilingual in Persian and English. Totally fascinating to find the cognates; many are surprisingly close still (daughter/dokhtar, star/setare, cow/gav). It’s fun feeling like I could communicate basic ideas to a proto Indo European speaker based on those really distant cognates.
It gets complicated by the preponderance of French loan words, although they tend to be for newer concepts such as car, elevator, etc.
There do also seem to be some genuine coincidences, such as sock it/saket, both being a somewhat forceful way to tell someone to be quiet.
But yes, Persian people and culture in particular has fascinated me due to the ancient, but not prehistoric, traces of a shared identity with Europeans, in contrast with its neighbors. It’s not something that gets a lot of attention in popular culture
Great idea for a vibe coded project that is actually creative/original. Got in the top 4% as a professional historian. Would be interesting to see the professions of the people in the top .1 percent - is it people with Geoguessr type abilities or more like art historians and curators at the Met, I wonder?
Totally agreed. I've never understood why people are so opposed to marginal annotations - it's part of why the book format succeeded as a technology! (i.e you can't marginally annotate a clay tablet). Incidentally, I always loved how Tolkien's maps had these pointing hands to indicate significant bits, and only after reading a lot of old manuscripts and incunabula in grad school did I realize that he was copying the favorite annotation of medieval writers, the manicule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manicule
Awesome, that's what I was going for. I originally made this for my own use and got kind of obsessed with building it out once I started finding unfamiliar books I enjoyed using the semantic search and category browsing. Glad to see it out in the world hopefully doing the same thing!
One thing that would make this information even more useful and searchable would be a JSON dump of your dataset. You could serve it statically on S3 or similar, to keep hosting costs to a minimum.
Of course, having created a cool thing generates no obligation for further work on your part! I'm grateful that you did this work and made it available for free.
Did you build your semantic search index based on the full text of the books, or just the reviews and descriptions?
Already tried to do this in a basic form. Advice from experts would be welcome as it's my first time trying to make data and an API available: https://book-prize-index.vercel.app/data
Also I just had to upgrade my Vercel plan due to traffic, which is very welcome and appreciated, but if anyone wants to donate, that would be really helpful! There's a Stripe link at the site: https://book-prize-index.vercel.app
Original author/creator of the site here - thank you! Will add the Axiom one. I am on the fence about whether/how to add "book of the year" type lists as they are somewhat distinct from book awards, but I do think that would probably be the next step to get more books in the corpus.
And any other ideas that HN readers have for awards to add would be welcome. Currently it's probably too history-slanted since I'm a historian and knew those awards better.
It may be hard to parse the lists but if they're still available somewhere online under the current administration the past annual State Department, CIA bookshelf recommendation, Army Chief of Staff, Navy CNO and Marine Commandant reading lists may have some valuable additions. To my knowledge there aren't any analogues to them in the rest of the Anglosphere but some LLMs will probably point out ones I haven't thought of.
I can point out that the UN agencies' respective reading lists for their staffs' professional development are 99% internal UN papers of very limited interest to external audiences but I haven't had a professional reason to look at any EU agencies to confirm or deny value.
Additionally, the Financial Times has a second set of book awards along their main awards which you've not listed, the FT reader's best books list.
