Ever since Dan Brown became a mega-selling author, critics have accused his books of being extremely formulaic: erudite academic, beautiful woman, ancient mystery, cartoonish villain. So over at Slate, we decided to see whether we could actually crack that formula and write Brown's next few books for him. Or at least the blurbs on the back cover.
The result is sort of like Mad Libs on steroids. Once readers select a city and an organization (or let the computer choose them randomly), the widget constructs a skeleton of a plot and randomly fills in the details from a big list of possibilities we compiled. For example, the superlative heroine described in the second paragraph-a staple of all Brown novels-might be "coltish and enigmatic" or "lithe and charming" or "freckled and brilliant." The mysterious symbol might be imprinted on a ring or etched into the floor.
The possible words and phrases are stored in an XML document called by the Flash, so it's easy to add more at any point. With more than 25 variables and hundreds of possible words and phrases, it is extremely unlikely that you will ever get the same story twice, even for the same city and cult. It may start to feel like the same old, same old after a while, but then again, so do the books themselves.
Here you can experience the next generation in online video, photo mosaics, interactive graphics and our next technological advances as well as get behind-the-scenes information on how the different projects were created. Click the "More about this project" link to read behind-the-scenes details about how it was created. You can also post comments and interact with the journalist and developers.
