I love textual analysis of this sort, and have done some vaguely similar analysis of HN front page activity[1], which includes some by-submitter and by-site bre

I love textual analysis of this sort, and have done some vaguely similar analysis of HN front page activity[1], which includes some by-submitter and by-site breakdowns. About a decade back I'd used a somewhat similar listing of "top global thinkers", compiled from Foreign Policy magazine, to come up with a proxy for substantiveness / quality ratings of various websites / domains / TLDs. I've wanted to follow that up with something based on philosophers, on the general assumption that such references tend to be more-than-topical, especially after one gets beyond the most popular / well-known names. In particular I'd found that there were disproportionately many references to the current/previous Popes (largely in highly populist publications), to Noam Chomsky (largely in leftist ones such as AlterNet), and Paul Krugman (a columnist at the NY Times whose name often appears on pages as part of the Times's teasers, in addition to his own columns and mentions in other articles). But I'd found the results overall to be informative. In particular I'm somewhat chuffed at my creation of the PF-KK ratio, which measures the prevalence of the list versus an arbitrarily-selected alternative search string to try to assess overall site substantiveness.[2] I've long wanted to do a repeat / more in-depth similar study, though there've been a few key challenges. One is coming up with a broader or more diverse list, of which TFA would be an excellent source. Another is that Google have made it far more difficult to conduct automated Web queries. My initial study required about 10,000 queries, which had to be spaced out by a minute or more if memory serves, and took over a week to run. Expanding either the domain or search lists vastly increases the number of queries required. I believe there are now some web query (as opposed to search) databases, though access to those remains challenging. Given the rise of AI and the ability to generate content based on numerous criteria, I'm not sure that such methods would be particularly useful, the Dead Internet may well be upon us. I'd also love to see the methodology of the Plato collection extended to earlier authors and philosophers, though I can see where that can be problematic, given variances in names (e.g., "Avicenna" or "Ibn Sina"?), distinguishing authors or philosophers from translators or editors, the problem of commentaries (credit to the original, the commentator, both?), etc., etc. Kudos to Eric Schwitzgebel for his work. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Nothing especially organised, though HN search will show about 25 comments: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20%22front%20page%22%20activity&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>, and there's more posted to the Fediverse under the #HackerNewsAnalytics hashtag: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics> 2. Archive as "Tracking the Conversation: FP Global 100 Thinkers on the Web" <https://web.archive.org/web/20220215192114/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220215192114/https://old.reddi...>