Recently James Nicoll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
james_davis_nicoll) polled his commentariat regarding whether they had read various authors who'd been winners of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which is supposedly given to "underread" authors who do not receive the attention their works deserve. I'm confident that James will have more to say about this topic sometime soon.
I recalled that when the folks who developed the Google Books Ngram Viewer first published a paper about their work in Science, they did a study to compare the relative levels of fame of a group of authors, and how fame changed with time. This presumed that "frequency of mention in books and magazines over the years" was a reasonable proxy for "fame."
It would seem one could also estimate obscurity this way. So it would be worthwhile to run the list of Cordwainer Smith Award winners through Ngram Viewer.
One problem: there's a limit to the number of characters a user is allowed to stuff into a query. So we cannot make a grand plot of all the winners at once.
Using James Nicoll's poll as a guide, I broke the winning authors up into groups, within which I hoped authors would have roughly comparable frequency. I then plotted the frequency of their names, within the Google Books English corpus (a subset curated for use with Ngram Viewer) with respect to time from 1900 to 2019. Three of oldest authors got special treatment in a group of their own.
Links to plots:
Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Judith Merril, R.A. Lafferty, Olaf Stapledon, Fredric Brown
Stanley G. Weinbaum, Carol Emshwiller, Edgar Pangborn, Katherine MacLean
Mark Clifton, D. G. Compton, Frank M. Robinson, Daniel F. Galouye, Mildred Clingerman, Rick Raphael, Seabury Quinn, Wyman Guin
William Hope Hodgson, A. Merritt, Clark Ashton Smith
Something funny is going on with Abraham Merritt. Not only is he far more frequent than all other authors from 1900 to 1970, but a peek back into the 19th century show that he was hugely popular in the years before he was born in 1884. I guess the string "A Merritt" must have been used for many more entities than the name of an SF writer. Most of the other authors have name-strings that are probably less common.
I grouped him together with Hodgson and Clark Ashton Smith because they all got their start in the pre-Amazing pulps earlier than most of the others. Both have leaps in frequency, Smith in the late 1970s and Hodgson in the 2010s, that may seem puzzling, but are probably connected to the high resurgence of interest in their not-so-obscure stable-mate, H. P. Lovecraft.
Among the first group, Stapledon's highest peak is around 1983, when his name reaches a frequency of 1.95E-8, or about 19.5 per billion words. At the same moment, Brackett is at 11.3 per billion words, and Kuttner 10.5 per billion words.
Play around. Leave a comment if you learn anything interesting.
james_davis_nicoll) polled his commentariat regarding whether they had read various authors who'd been winners of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which is supposedly given to "underread" authors who do not receive the attention their works deserve. I'm confident that James will have more to say about this topic sometime soon.I recalled that when the folks who developed the Google Books Ngram Viewer first published a paper about their work in Science, they did a study to compare the relative levels of fame of a group of authors, and how fame changed with time. This presumed that "frequency of mention in books and magazines over the years" was a reasonable proxy for "fame."
It would seem one could also estimate obscurity this way. So it would be worthwhile to run the list of Cordwainer Smith Award winners through Ngram Viewer.
One problem: there's a limit to the number of characters a user is allowed to stuff into a query. So we cannot make a grand plot of all the winners at once.
Using James Nicoll's poll as a guide, I broke the winning authors up into groups, within which I hoped authors would have roughly comparable frequency. I then plotted the frequency of their names, within the Google Books English corpus (a subset curated for use with Ngram Viewer) with respect to time from 1900 to 2019. Three of oldest authors got special treatment in a group of their own.
Links to plots:
Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Judith Merril, R.A. Lafferty, Olaf Stapledon, Fredric Brown
Stanley G. Weinbaum, Carol Emshwiller, Edgar Pangborn, Katherine MacLean
Mark Clifton, D. G. Compton, Frank M. Robinson, Daniel F. Galouye, Mildred Clingerman, Rick Raphael, Seabury Quinn, Wyman Guin
William Hope Hodgson, A. Merritt, Clark Ashton Smith
Something funny is going on with Abraham Merritt. Not only is he far more frequent than all other authors from 1900 to 1970, but a peek back into the 19th century show that he was hugely popular in the years before he was born in 1884. I guess the string "A Merritt" must have been used for many more entities than the name of an SF writer. Most of the other authors have name-strings that are probably less common.
I grouped him together with Hodgson and Clark Ashton Smith because they all got their start in the pre-Amazing pulps earlier than most of the others. Both have leaps in frequency, Smith in the late 1970s and Hodgson in the 2010s, that may seem puzzling, but are probably connected to the high resurgence of interest in their not-so-obscure stable-mate, H. P. Lovecraft.
Among the first group, Stapledon's highest peak is around 1983, when his name reaches a frequency of 1.95E-8, or about 19.5 per billion words. At the same moment, Brackett is at 11.3 per billion words, and Kuttner 10.5 per billion words.
Play around. Leave a comment if you learn anything interesting.
