Character database

I had high hopes when I first saw news of the CharacTour database. They say of themselves "We want to be your virtual tour guide to the world of characters so you can find a new favorite movie, TV show, book, video game, or webcomic." Perhaps it's unfair, but I was hoping for rather more on the side of books, but the emphasis is very much on movies. However, having got that out of the way, it's not a bad search tool at all. You can search for people by name, by profession (librarian is not listed however!), location, time period, ethnicity and so on. Once you have located the character that interests you the site provides a good profile, which is spoiler free, suggestions of other similar characters, where you can find the character (books and movies for example), related characters and user generated comments. 

It gets interesting when you search for real people, who shouldn't in theory be in the database, but they are. So Jane Austen gets her own mention, since she's a character in a movie but there's also a list of other key characters created by her. 

The database is still very small, some 45,000 characters. Consequently there are lots of gaps; Elizabeth Bennet is only to be found in one movie and one book for example. However, this is balanced by the great deal of amusing stuff that is to be found - you can match yourself against different characters by taking a quiz. (Unfortunately I have no idea who the top half dozen matches I got, since I'm not really into modern teenage culture!) You can get quotes, rankings for funny things such as 'characters who we would trust to avenge our death' and so on.

This tool is going to appeal to librarians who get asked about movies, characters, 'oh, can't remember their name but they were in so and so film' etc. Hopefully as more data gets added the resource will become ever more useful, and once it's got a lot of fictional characters in it, hopefully it will really take off. 

Comments

[Pete McEntegart]

Thanks very much for checking us out. In the interest of full disclosure, we must confess we currently have about 4,500 character profiles, not 45,000. But hopefully with the support of people like you and your readers, we'll get there someday!

Cheers,
Pete McEntegart
Editor in Chief, CharacTour