Conversation

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The textual territory of the “life of the mind” is bigger than say Bloom’s idea of western canon, but is not infinite, though it would have a long tail. I think a survey with a few 100 titles on it would capture 80% of intellectual background of 3-sigma of moderate/heavy readers.
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I think I’d conduct such a survey in 2 phases. Phase 1, get survey group to inventory and report self-assessed “best known” books in personal canon. Merge, count, and prune to say 200 titles. Phase 2, same/larger group is surveyed about the whole list Then graph/cluster
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Phase 2 survey would be something like a 0-5 scale: 0: never heard of it 1: heard of it 2: Wikipedia gloss 3. Browsed/part read 4. Read casually 5. Read critically, informed by its home tradition/influences Plus maybe a love/hate bit to capture tribalism for the >2s
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Only constraints: at least 20 years old, max 1 core representative book in the case of genre authors (otherwise this becomes a genre flood) No restriction to academic ideas of “canonical”... we want to map canons not see through lens of existing dominant brand-name canons
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Interesting that everybody is jumping to the conclusion that I’m after genealogical maps of writerly influence. No I’m after readerly maps of idea-association. Crowd’s collective headcanon rather than genealogy or intellectual history as reconstructed by scholars of traditions.
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The crowd’s reading/citation maps should not be understood as crude estimates or ersatz versions of writer genealogies or intellectual histories. They are an alt non-Straussian idea of canoncity. One I suspect is more robust and better in key ways. Readerly ethnomethodology.
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Replying to
This is the function of the canon. Posterity has done the filtering for you. IMO, time is better spent on reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading these works than Big Data crunching them.
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