Now that's data mining!

[elfs]

Books That Make You Dumb is a data mining exercise in which the writer take "My favorite books" from facebook data and indexes it with "My university," then uses the university as a key to correlate the popularity of a book with the corresponding university's average admissions SAT scores.

The results are fascinating. The "smartest" book, barely edging out the slightly wider spread of 100 Years of Solitude, is the Nabokov favorite, Lolita. The dumbest books? Almost anything by erotica writer "Zane." (Note to self: don't read!) The Bible did not fare well in this analysis, nor did The Color Purple.

Comments

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Farenheit 451 didn't do very well either, which frightens me slightly...

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

As it happens, I came across some criticism of that book elsenet, in the last few days. It isn't, it seems, a book that stands up to rereading. What is interesting is that, classed as a dystopia, it's part of a lower-ranking set. The African-American set didn't come out well, either.

It makes me wonder how important a positive, can-do, attitude is, in whatever SATs and intelligence tests measure.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that at least some of that is attributable to a sort of "high point of literature" phenomenon - this is based on books listed by college students as their favorite books, and there are two common reasons I can think of for naming a book as a favorite: You really liked it, or you want to be seen as intelligent for having named it as a favorite.

Based on that, I'd think (and my own experience with lists of this sort anecdotally bears this out) that these lists reflect the books that students at these schools see as both personally meaningful and impressive to name-drop - what they see as the highest point of the literature they've read. (Actually, I can see two other minor phenomena at work: One, the Holy Bible phenomenon - the fundamentalist desire to name-check their Holy Book Of Choice(tm) whenever possible, as a means of in-group identification. Two, the Harry Potter phenomenon - the desire to list books that are actively relevant in popular culture Right Now, to advertise participation in a shared cultural event. But I don't think either of those can account for the general trending, since the Bible is only one book, and shared cultural events probably cut across demographics.)

That certainly seems to explain why the African-American set (which all seem to have been books name-dropped on American TV in the last 10 years, mostly by Oprah) place low: lower-achieving students would be more willing to name-drop an Oprah's book club book, while higher-achieving students would be more likely to choose something whose cachet is more firmly in the highbrow litcrit world.

Of course, this is all speculation - to actually get this data, you'd need to randomly sample students at some representative set of the schools, and ask their opinions on a pre-selected set of books. That would eliminate the selection bias inherent in using self-reported lists of "favorite" books.

Is interesting to look at this data and try to figure out the "why" behind it, though.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I shall point to how "The Bible" and "The Holy Bible" rank differently.

"C S Lewis" and "The Chronicles of Narnia" also make me wonder,

My own experience of school makes me wonder how many of these books are part of English Lit courses at school, which can be something of a killer in my experience. But does American education have the sort of study that I sometimes struggled through for O-levels, all those years ago. At least my teachers made Shakespeare interesting: Austen, Bickens and Hardy didn't stand a chance in my mind against Anderson, Dickson, and Heinlein.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

The "Bible" vs. "Holy Bible" thing was the reason I mentioned the religious phenomenon, yeah. =) Fascinating, isn't it?

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

Heh. I really adored One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's one of the 'favorite' books I always name when I want to brush up my litcrit cred. As opposed to my favorite trashy books, World War Z or A Kiss Of Shadows.