Ngrams and books

Here's a neat concept out of the fincial services industry that might have application in culture and reading. From Too Central to Fail by Alex Tabarrok. What they are dealing with in the original paper is whether we ought to be concerned only with the size of a bank (in terms of systemic risk of failure) or whether we ought to also take into account the centrality of the bank within the system. A big bank that has a low level of interconnectedness with other banks may pose less risk than a smaller bank that is much more interconnected. Their research indicates that we indeed should be looking at centrality as well as size when we seek to manage systemic risk.

Here is a graphic that illustrates their point.

Looking at this made me wonder whether there might be a way to take the same concept and apply it to books in order to determine the extent to which particular books influence our overall culture. Some books are read by many people over many years. Some books are a flash in the pan with huge sales in a given short period of time and then they disappear from the cultural radar screen. It is instructive to look at best seller lists of fifty years ago and realize just how many of the names of those authors are completely unknown today.

What might a comparable graphic look like for books. Which books are most central and how would we measure that? Citations perhaps. Or perhaps, Google Ngram, a version of citations. Here is the Ngram for five books that are viewed as classics and/or are considered controversial; To Kill a Mockingbird, The Little Engine That Could, Lord of the Flies, Go Ask Alice, And Tango Makes Three.

My interpretation of this chart (mentions in books between 1960 - 2008) would be that The Little Engine That Could has grown over time as a children's classic and is now mentioned two or three times as often as in the seventies or eighties. Go Ask Alice climbed with the drug scene but is less than half as relevant as even ten years ago. Lord of the Flies continues with a very strong showing but down 30% perhaps from its peak in the mid-sixties. To Kill a Mockingbird goes from strength to strength. And Tango Makes Three drove a lot of controversy when it came out 2005. Despite all the talk and the book challenges at libraries and the extensive discussions in the ephemera press - there was not even a blip in the more permanent record of books.

People are often concerned about the erosion of morals and values and in general a darkening of modern children's literature. There is concern just how much modern children's literature might be eroding our culture. I created an Ngram to look at how much the Bible, Homer and Shakespeare are being discussed in the past five decades versus such classics or best sellers as Harper Lee, Rowling, and the Twilight series.

As you can see in the following Ngram, Twilight, To Kill a Mockingbird and Harry Potter, as much as they are significant part of the childhood reading pantheon today, are swamped by the avid conversation that continues around the Bible, Homer and Shakespeare.

Finally, I look at Harper Lee, Rowling, Stephenie Meyer versus Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Tolkien, and Peter Pan, more classic children's authors/books. Only Rowling gives the old masters a run for their money.

The burden of choosing good books for our children remains a significant and consequential one but the gloom and doom concern about just how corrosive contemporary children's literature might be is, if not misplaced, perhaps at least less consequential than we might have considered.