The Lord of the Rings is known to be a complex story, consisting of many characters with uncommon names traveling to places with even more unusual names. To make matters even more complicated, the characters travel in groups of different formation around “Middle Earth” to chase the “ring”, which exhibits itself not as just an dead artifact, but as an item with its own will, motivation and strong influence.

So, nothing is more challenging than finding travel patterns by using text-mining techniques on the actual text of the books of the Lord of the Rings. This is exactly what Marius Politze and Bastian Küppers had in mind when they selected their topic for the practical assignment of the course Text-Mining at Maastricht University.

In this video you can see a short overview of the project and a video of the results:

• Automatic identification of main characters and locations from language without predefined dictionaries. Note: also the ring is identified as a character.
• Automatic identification of travel patterns.
• Visualize in space and time on a map of Middle Earth.

A really great project!