Aleph-Zero-Heros

This is a blog about (mathematical) data science of large-scale hybrid narratives and superheros in particular.

The title of the blog comes from a perhaps obscure piece of mathematics: aleph zero is (mathematically speaking) the cardinality of the set of natural numbers, which is a pretty mathsy way of saying “infinity”. So the name, aleph-zero-heros, loosely translates as infinite heroes.

The blog is going to be focused on superhero narratives, hence the title, but it is broader than just that. We’re going to look at large-scale hybrid narratives. A hybrid narrative (to me) is a story (fiction or non-fiction) that involves multiple forms of media. We can get an idea by considering simple examples of old-school hybrids

• picture books and graphic novels
• choose your own adventure books, which combine games with prose

and so on, or the modern mash-ups that the web has made it so easy to create augmented reality systems.

But technology today has allowed artists and writers to build much larger joint constructs, and that is what I am interested in here.

I’ve gone into much more detail in this post.