> In an attempt to validate a mathematical model of mine I have implemented a crowd sourcing survey addressing the question, "How 'great' are the Great Books?" -- http://bit.ly/auPD9Q
When I ask the question, "How 'great' are the Great Books?" I am purposely having fun with words, but at the same time the question is serious.
On one hand I am asking questions about a qualitative characteristic -- greatness. Such a thing may be akin to asking, "How beautiful is a work by Picasso?" or "How delicious is chocolate ice cream?" Silly? Maybe. On the other hand, put many of these beautiful or delicious things together and they probably share a number of measurable elements. Perhaps size, color, theme, ratio of sugar to cocoa, temperature, etc.
That is what I'm doing the Hutchins's Great Books of the Western World. I am calculating the number of times they contain his "great ideas" in order to denote greatness. The end result will be a benchmark I can use to compare with other works. The goal is not really to determine the greatest books, but rather to create a scale to compare them. In a world where full text abounds and crowd sourcing is feasible, all of this has implications on the descriptions of library materials -- catalogs and "discovery systems". I think our systems could benefit from the use of an increased number of quantitative descriptions. Examples include size measured in words (not bytes or pages), readability (Flesch) score, grade level (such as the Fog or Kincaid indexes), or maybe even a "greatness" measure.
The Survey has been answered more than 3,800 times by more than 230 people. So far the "greatest" book is Goethe's Faust, and the least "greatest" book is Hippocrates's On Hemorrhoids. Add your opinions to the pile -- http://bit.ly/auPD9Q Vote early. Vote often. There are no wrong answers.
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Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
Received on Tue Nov 09 2010 - 09:30:13 EST