Recognition of characters and their significance within written works

Named entity recognition is applied to identify text strings corresponding to character identities in a written work. The textual strings are grouped according to character identity and, from each group, a primary name is selected. A significance is calculated for each of the character identities. The character identities including the primary names are presented in a catalog based on the calculated significance. In some embodiments, character identity identification results are refined by allowing users to vote regarding the significance of the character identities and by granting more weight to the votes of users with a close relationship to the written work.