Asimov's Foundation -- turning a data story into an NFT artwork

Abstract

In this piece, we overview Isaac Asimov's most iconic work, the Foundation series, with two primary goals: to provide quantitative insights about the novels and bridge data science with digital art. First, we rely on data science and text processing tools to describe certain properties of Asimov's career and the novels, focusing on the different worlds in Asimov's universe. Then we transform the books' texts into a network centered around Asimov's planets and their semantic context. Finally, we introduce the world of crypto art and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by transforming the visualized network into a high-end digital piece of art minted as an NFT. Additionally, to pay tribute to Asimov's devotion to robotics and artificial intelligence, we use OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) to draft several paragraphs of this paper.