Show HN: Visualizing How Books Reference Each Other Across 3k Years

There are two parts for this project:

1) The LLM-powered pipeline to extract citations (books + authors) from books and resolve them using both Wikipedia and Goodreads with offline copies I have. The result is data associating Books/Authors to other Books/Authors with accurate bibliographical information spanning centuries.

2) A WebGPU + D3.js powered visualization tool written by Claude Code so I'm able to deal with all this data on the browser on a more or less comfortable experience for the viewer.

I spent some months on a off with this project, and definitely the most challenging part was dealing with accurate bibliographical information across centuries, with original publication dates and etc. For that I wrote what is now a very complex pipeline with LLMs (I used DeepSeek V3.2) wired on offline Goodreads and Wikipedia databases + a fallback that actually uses the internet.

Hope you enjoy it! Open to suggestions on how to improve the system :)

Code is here: https://github.com/ThiagoLira/bookgraph-revisited

Summary

This article revisits the BookGraph project, a recommendation system that uses a graph-based approach to suggest books to users based on their reading history and preferences. The author discusses the evolution of the project, its technical implementation, and the lessons learned during its development.

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Show HN: Visualizing How Books Reference Each Other Across 3k Years