4 ms·

Out of curiosity I looked for Isaac Asimov, but he wasn't there. Instead, I looked at Mark Twain. The site only lists his novels, and curiously one of his short

by dalke 12y ago

Out of curiosity I looked for Isaac Asimov, but he wasn't there. Instead, I looked at Mark Twain. The site only lists his novels, and curiously one of his short stories. Twain wrote a lot of short stories (also available in collections) which aren't on the list. Also, it uses a line graph to connect publication dates and word counts, but the line between those points is meaningless. At best it should be a step graph, where the height is based on the number of words for a publication divided by the time between publications. Otherwise it looks like Twain wrote less and less from 1875 to 1880, until finally publishing The Prince and the Pauper.

batub 12y ago
I'll look into the missing short stories. The tool I created that aggregates all the metadata is pretty good at finding novels, but it still needs A LOT of work with short stories. It'll probably be easier if I focus on collections, though. Yeah, after thinking about your comment, a line graph doesn't make a lot of sense. As you said, it kinda skews the viewer's mind about how the author was writing his books. I'll look into step graphs and change all the graphs soon. Thanks for the feedback! This is just a pet project, but it's nice to have some helpful criticism.
- dalke 12y ago
  You're welcome. The premise is nice - how long it takes famous authors to write books - it's just that the graphs don't answer that question. It looks like you made the change to a step function. I think you have the direction wrong. Consider C. S. Lewis. I don't think he wrote 150K words per year for almost 5 years to produce the 36K words for The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Lewis was also an essayist. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis_bibliography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis_bibliography for the many essays not included in your list. In fact, the bio says "His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity ..." but Mere Christianity isn't on the list of books. Or consider that 'The Great Divorce' was originally written as a serial for The Guardian, and at the same time as writing 'That Hideous Strength', so it's not that he worked full time on first one then the other. I hope your project it's a labor of love, as the complete answers (the sort that won't irritate fans or detailed oriented people like me) will get you bogged down in details that require a lot of manual research. But you'll have the admiration of the few who really do care.
  - batub 12y ago
    So you think a right step graph would work better? I changed the graphs to have a right step instead of a left step, but the graphs still don't make a lot of sense. The lines in the graphs are supposed to represent the time it took between publications, but I think people are thinking that the author was writing at a constant X amount of words for however long the line between publications is. Yeah, there's probably a lot of books that were being written while others were being finished up or started as well. When I first started developing this, I thought about finding data about how long it takes an author to WRITE book X, Y, or Z, but I couldn't find accurate information about that for most authors. So that's why I decided to use publication dates. I understand how people think that books are written in a linear fashion - one after another - because of this, but there's not much I can do about it, because most authors don't share this information and a lot of ones are already dead. For the missing works, I'll have to revise my tool to find anything that are not novels or just enter the data for essays, short stories, collections, etc. manually, though that'll probably not be feasible time wise.
    - dalke 12y ago
      Assuming all the information were available, I would like to see how many words (of the published version; not all the intermediate drafts) were written during a given year. If it took 2 years to write 100,000 words for a release on 2014-01-01 then 2012 and 2013 would be at 50,000 words each. That would indeed be a 'constant X amount of words for however long the line between publications is'. (This also assumes no publication delay. I have no idea how to tell how long it took to get edited and reviewed.) It's possible to fake it. You could compute the average publication rate then backtrack that amount for each publication date, assuming a constant rate. Then let overlapping publications sum, and use a smoothing function to interpolate. It's still a mess. Especially if there are any posthumous publications. Yes, getting the actual rate requires a lot of research, including perhaps talking to people who study those authors. Eg, a Twain scholar probably knows a lot more about when things were published. But this gets into serious labor of love (or Master's thesis) territory.
      - batub 12y ago

by dalke 12y ago

batub 12y ago

I'll look into the missing short stories. The tool I created that aggregates all the metadata is pretty good at finding novels, but it still needs A LOT of work with short stories. It'll probably be easier if I focus on collections, though. Yeah, after thinking about your comment, a line graph doesn't make a lot of sense. As you said, it kinda skews the viewer's mind about how the author was writing his books. I'll look into step graphs and change all the graphs soon. Thanks for the feedback! This is just a pet project, but it's nice to have some helpful criticism.

dalke 12y ago
You're welcome. The premise is nice - how long it takes famous authors to write books - it's just that the graphs don't answer that question. It looks like you made the change to a step function. I think you have the direction wrong. Consider C. S. Lewis. I don't think he wrote 150K words per year for almost 5 years to produce the 36K words for The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Lewis was also an essayist. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis_bibliography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis_bibliography for the many essays not included in your list. In fact, the bio says "His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity ..." but Mere Christianity isn't on the list of books. Or consider that 'The Great Divorce' was originally written as a serial for The Guardian, and at the same time as writing 'That Hideous Strength', so it's not that he worked full time on first one then the other. I hope your project it's a labor of love, as the complete answers (the sort that won't irritate fans or detailed oriented people like me) will get you bogged down in details that require a lot of manual research. But you'll have the admiration of the few who really do care.
- batub 12y ago
  So you think a right step graph would work better? I changed the graphs to have a right step instead of a left step, but the graphs still don't make a lot of sense. The lines in the graphs are supposed to represent the time it took between publications, but I think people are thinking that the author was writing at a constant X amount of words for however long the line between publications is. Yeah, there's probably a lot of books that were being written while others were being finished up or started as well. When I first started developing this, I thought about finding data about how long it takes an author to WRITE book X, Y, or Z, but I couldn't find accurate information about that for most authors. So that's why I decided to use publication dates. I understand how people think that books are written in a linear fashion - one after another - because of this, but there's not much I can do about it, because most authors don't share this information and a lot of ones are already dead. For the missing works, I'll have to revise my tool to find anything that are not novels or just enter the data for essays, short stories, collections, etc. manually, though that'll probably not be feasible time wise.
  - dalke 12y ago
    Assuming all the information were available, I would like to see how many words (of the published version; not all the intermediate drafts) were written during a given year. If it took 2 years to write 100,000 words for a release on 2014-01-01 then 2012 and 2013 would be at 50,000 words each. That would indeed be a 'constant X amount of words for however long the line between publications is'. (This also assumes no publication delay. I have no idea how to tell how long it took to get edited and reviewed.) It's possible to fake it. You could compute the average publication rate then backtrack that amount for each publication date, assuming a constant rate. Then let overlapping publications sum, and use a smoothing function to interpolate. It's still a mess. Especially if there are any posthumous publications. Yes, getting the actual rate requires a lot of research, including perhaps talking to people who study those authors. Eg, a Twain scholar probably knows a lot more about when things were published. But this gets into serious labor of love (or Master's thesis) territory.
    - batub 12y ago