4 ms·

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 se

by 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
  hahaha, I like working on this, but researching each individual publication sounds like something that I wouldn't be able to do. What I'll probably end up doing is open sourcing the database + website and allowing others to contribute. Again, thanks for your help.

by batub 12y ago

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
hahaha, I like working on this, but researching each individual publication sounds like something that I wouldn't be able to do. What I'll probably end up doing is open sourcing the database + website and allowing others to contribute. Again, thanks for your help.