Published: Sun 22 February 2026
By dwward
In Blog .
Gatsby Metaphor Project
I made this blog almost a year ago and haven't been active as new roles at work haven't allow me to pursue my geek hobbies. However, I saw a Treasury job posting a couple weeks ago with a question so divergent from the norm that I felt compelled to solve it even if I have no intent to work there.
What If AI Could Read Between the Lines?
Literary analysis has always required a trained eye — someone who can spot the moment Fitzgerald calls the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg "blue and gigantic" and understand exactly what weight that image carries. What if that skill could scale?
The Gatsby Metaphor Platform is an AI-powered web application that does exactly that. Upload any literary text, and the system dispatches a language model to hunt for metaphors, similes, and figurative devices — classifying each by type, scoring its confidence, and pinpointing its location down to the chapter and paragraph.
But detection is only the beginning. The platform then synthesizes a full written analysis, generates an executive summary, and translates everything into multiple languages — with quality validation baked in.
Under the hood: a FastAPI backend, PostgreSQL persistence, async processing, result caching to avoid redundant AI calls, and a clean REST API for every operation.
It turns a craft historically locked behind expertise into something any reader can access on demand.