As a first step I watched one of the tutorials because I was kind off confused with all the options I had to feed Alice to get the right result. After that I clicked through the different libraries and looked at the word clouds to find a matching one. My book focused a lot on fortification and especially on the architecture of city trenches. So I decided to select the „Architecture Library“ and choose „architecture“ as topic. I started the search with „fortification“ and used the „Explore“ option. The first results were rather disappointing because they used the word in a descriptive way or only in a referenced book title. But after scrolling for a bit I found more fitting use of the word. In a next step I focused more on the books that had many entries.
One Book I found is „The Riddle of the Real City“ by Wim Nijenhuis. The book discusses different forms of fortification for cities. There is also the talk of the Vauban fortification which is the same method that was described and illustrated in my book. The fortification is heavily reliant on water trenches and very symmetrical. To find out more about the book I used Google and found more information about the author. Wim Nijenhuis is a Dutch architectural theorist, who pursues a creative goal in his book of stimulating new ways of thinking in architectural culture. The book was published 2017 which means that the author had an historic view on city fortification and was not designing his own fortification like the author of my book. The second book I found was „The Culture of Cities“ by Lewis Mumford. He talks about the same fortification but also about how this sort of fortification became outdated pretty fast because of the more precise use of artillery. The Book was published in 1938 and therefore heavily influenced by WW1 and its war machines.
All in all it was very interesting to use „Ask Alice“ even though I think more skills with using the AI would make the whole process way easier.