“There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.”

January 22, 2022 7:37 PM

Literature Clock tells the current time (or close enough) in the form of a literary quote.

By Johs Enevoldsen, based on Jaap Meijers's nifty E-reader clock.

posted by oulipian (16 comments total)

"...them an approximate time. It was 10:41"

Time Remaining to Edit: 4:20
posted by clavdivs at 7:43 PM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

This seems pretty thorough. I could be wrong, but just messing around with ls, wc, grep, sort, tr, and uniq, it appears to cover 907 out of 1440 unique minutes of the day with 1451 quotes from 828 titles by 572 authors. The data files are here.
posted by Wobbuffet at 7:50 PM on January 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

It automatically updates, but it seems like there isn’t a quote for every single minute (understandable!), so sometimes it takes longer.
posted by oulipian at 7:51 PM on January 22, 2022

Incidentally, I think these are the top 10 sources:

  55     "title": "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time",
  26     "title": "a fraction of the whole",
  25     "title": "infinite jest",
  22     "title": "the undomestic goddess",
  17     "title": "bridget jones's diary",
  12     "title": "the voices of time",
  11     "title": "the great gatsby",
  11     "title": "hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world",
  10     "title": "ulysses",
  10     "title": "dracula",

posted by Wobbuffet at 7:54 PM on January 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

"He will be here at eleven exactly, sir.’ At the bar, naked couples had begun dancing."
posted by clavdivs at 8:00 PM on January 22, 2022

it does refresh in window. Nice.
posted by clavdivs at 8:01 PM on January 22, 2022

Is there a mechanism for submitting coverage for the remaining ~500 minutes? Like, if one should come across one?

It looks like the data is sourced from a crowd-sourced quote bank on The Guardian. On the original article you can find a box to submit your own here. It was originally posted in 2011 though -- would be interested to see if they're still updating the list. Such a fun project!
posted by BeesLikeMe at 8:05 PM on January 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

It automatically updates, but it seems like there isn’t a quote for every single minute (understandable!), so sometimes it takes longer.

I got a quote for 1:30pm at 1:29pm, but then another quote for 1:30pm when it actually became 1:30pm. So I think it updates every minute regardless.

Edit: This was the page auto updating. I didn't refresh it myself.
posted by Literaryhero at 8:31 PM on January 22, 2022

Reminds me of Christian Marclay's surprisingly riveting The Clock, a 24-hour montage of film clips showing clocks displaying the time. (It's hard to describe but here's a clip around 3 pm.)
posted by babelfish at 9:02 PM on January 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

The e-reader version looks neat, but even as someone who has jailbroken a phone now and then, the Instructables instructions seem both complicated and directed at people who knows their way around many of the subject areas already. In the three years since this project was released, has there been any simpler/dumber way developed to get this running on a Kindle? Or should I just forget about and it and just get a cheap tablet that can keep the web page displayed?
posted by chortly at 10:03 PM on January 22, 2022

This is super, super cool, and also delightful.

They parked the car outside Lowther's at precisely one minute to eleven. People were leaving, not all of them happy at having their evening curtailed. But the grumbling was muted, and even then it only started once they were safely on the street.
The Complaints, Ian Rankin

And I just love it when people make their source code and data available for people curious about the mysterious workings behind the project.

Thank you so much for posting this, oulipian!
posted by kristi at 11:03 PM on January 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

Now I'm curious to see if they differentiate between AM and PM in the quotes, which would often only be known in story context.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:08 PM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

It looks like the data is sourced from a crowd-sourced quote bank on The Guardian.

Yes, there are matching typos, as in: - Freedom, Jonathan Frantzen (sic)

I submitted a correction, maybe they'll update it; though it's over ten years old the Google Form still takes submissions.
posted by radagast at 1:09 AM on January 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

It does appear to have used a database with AM/PM context, judging from the time quotes last night and this morning, which is pretty neat.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:59 AM on January 23, 2022

I love niche data-heavy projects like this so much.
posted by cortex at 8:58 AM on January 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm just happy to find places that recognize those of us whose clocks indicate Mountain Standard Time.
posted by kozad at 10:22 AM on January 23, 2022