Comments on: Author “Significance” From Catalogue Data http://rufuspollock.org/2009/11/05/author-significance-from-catalogue-data/ Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:17:51 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.4 By: Rufus Pollock http://rufuspollock.org/2009/11/05/author-significance-from-catalogue-data/comment-page-1/#comment-162330 Rufus Pollock Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:34:38 +0000 http://www.rufuspollock.org/2009/11/05/author-significance-from-catalogue-data/#comment-162330 <p>magistra: your point about prolificity is well taken. As I mentioned at the start of the post, simple counts co-mingle a variety of factors.</p> <p>The obvious way to deal with the prolificity issue would be to separate the counts into "number of distinct works" and "counts per work". Doing this obviously requires us to distinguish Publications ("Items") from "Works". Unfortunately this is a tricky issue and one we have had only mixed success with doing (see previous posts in the <a href="http://www.rufuspollock.org/tags/eupd/" rel="nofollow">EUPD series</a> such as <a href="http://www.rufuspollock.org/2009/03/12/computing-copyright-or-public-domain-status-of-cultural-works/" rel="nofollow">this one</a> for more on this).</p> <p>Checking on the two authors you mention reveals Chaucer clocking in at 149 and Austen at 112. I would point out as well that this analysis is only based on the catalogue up to 1960 (Austen's popularity seems to have grown particularly rapidly in recent times).</p> <p>On the supplementary catalogue point could you give me a bit more information about what it would mean if material were only recorded in supplementary catalogues -- is it that this means it wouldn't be in the main (digitized) catalogue I am using?</p> magistra: your point about prolificity is well taken. As I mentioned at the start of the post, simple counts co-mingle a variety of factors.

The obvious way to deal with the prolificity issue would be to separate the counts into “number of distinct works” and “counts per work”. Doing this obviously requires us to distinguish Publications (“Items”) from “Works”. Unfortunately this is a tricky issue and one we have had only mixed success with doing (see previous posts in the EUPD series such as this one for more on this).

Checking on the two authors you mention reveals Chaucer clocking in at 149 and Austen at 112. I would point out as well that this analysis is only based on the catalogue up to 1960 (Austen’s popularity seems to have grown particularly rapidly in recent times).

On the supplementary catalogue point could you give me a bit more information about what it would mean if material were only recorded in supplementary catalogues — is it that this means it wouldn’t be in the main (digitized) catalogue I am using?

]]> By: magistra http://rufuspollock.org/2009/11/05/author-significance-from-catalogue-data/comment-page-1/#comment-162314 magistra Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:57:17 +0000 http://www.rufuspollock.org/2009/11/05/author-significance-from-catalogue-data/#comment-162314 <p>I heard your talk at Cambridge UL today, so was interested to read more about the project. I suspect prolificity skews the data quite heavily: two of the authors I was surprised to see missing were Chaucer and Jane Austen. As for the poor showing for the C19 stuff, is it possible this was influenced by some books only being recorded in the supplementary catalogues from 1800 onwards?</p> I heard your talk at Cambridge UL today, so was interested to read more about the project. I suspect prolificity skews the data quite heavily: two of the authors I was surprised to see missing were Chaucer and Jane Austen. As for the poor showing for the C19 stuff, is it possible this was influenced by some books only being recorded in the supplementary catalogues from 1800 onwards?

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