Zeitgeist gets weirder
I've added some more statistics to the Zeitgeist page. I describe them below, and my opinion comes free!50 Top taggers. Time to get recognized for your tagging. Carminowe has 23,000 tags!
50 Top-rated authors. I find this a bit ho-hum. Who are these people? And as for Anna Akhmatova—I guess if you like her, you like her.
50 Lowest-rated author. Why do people own books they hate? One factor is clearly "assigned books"—Hegel, Kant and Heidegger; partisans love them, but there are a lot of copies out there that have been flung across the room the night before the final exam. I think August Derleth falls under the category "completist disappointment." Lovecraft fans feel compelled to own him, but he just isn't that good. I don't understand Catherine Coulter and Candace Bushnell. As far as Claude Levi-Strauss goes, what's wrong with you people! ;)
Top 25 long tags. The top tags seems very monosyllabic, but LibraryThing users are fond of longer, descriptive tags. This is a sampling of tags of at least 25 letters.
posted by Tim at 12:29 PM
28 Comments:
ZeeGeezer's Bent Blog has a funny post on the "Top-rated authors." S/he writes:
"Aack! There's only one there that I've even heard of. A cookbook writer."
ZeeGeezer also notes that GOD makes the list of top authors (with a 4.8, way to go). It's not that I'm against God—on the contrary, as a glance at my library would show—but I am against God.
Anyway, that list was a little strange. The main thing that got you on it was obscurity—the fewer ratings, the less of a chance one would be low. So I upped it to a minimum of 10 ratings by five people, and the list is much better: Harper Lee, Czeslaw Milosz, Chris Van Allsburg, etc. Is Richard Rhodes really THAT great?
It's funny for a German then you use the word Zeitgeist:)
Anyway, can anyone explain me why I can't find my ratings anymore and that it looks like I never rated a book?? I surely rated the books I've read already and own but it seems like that data has fallen of the roof of the database?
my librarythingname is marcel
I too am fascinated by the 'worst' list, and asked myself the same question ('Why have many books by an author you dislike?').
But when clicking on the authors in question, there's no way to tell which books got the bad ratings. Would it be difficult to show 'rating' by the titles? (Not that I'm into ratings -- I haven't rated any of my books.)
Marcel:
RE: Rating. I'm showing you rated 25 of your 76 books. I think you're probably not on the right "view." Change your "display view" or choose "change fields."
RE: Zeitgeist. It must be. Shock of the familiar, as it were. "Zeitgeist" has a long history in upscale English, but the Web has taken it over—particularly the "2.0" Web. At least I capitalize it. Lower-case zeitgeist is far too common on Web 2.0 websites. Sheesh!
And upper-case titles for non-English books are far too common on LT. Sheesh! ;p
I haven't rated any of my books, or if I have it was by accident. It's one of those things I'll need to think up guidelines for and sit down to do it all at once for some relative consistency, and I haven't had time.
Tim, I appreciate the mention of God's literary output. One of my books is The Glasgow Gospel "by" Jamie Stuart. Your posting reminded me that although He may be uncredited, God is surely Stuart's co-author at the very least. He has now been restored to His rightful place thanks to the "Other Authors" field....
Suggestion - Most tagged books. Highest average number of tags on an individual book. Might indicate a measure of genre crossing.
Why do people own books they hate?
This reminds me of something I've been wondering about: am I the ONLY person using LibraryThing to catalog not only books I own (I haven't gotten far on that yet, actually), but also books I do not own (i.e. books I want to buy, books I want to get from the library, and books I have read but do not own)? Does anyone else do this?
Are you sure you want to know? ;-)
http://groups.google.com/group/Librarything/browse_thread/thread/aa4c356a3e8e8be7/e1cde12e0aaddc81#e1cde12e0aaddc81
2nd try...
Francis Bacon? What the heck?
I guess I'm with the masses on Kant, though.
A couple of things which wouldn't take long.
1) Layout of the more page on largest libraries. 100 libraries listed in a narrow colunm down the left and the most use pictures in a narrow band across the top, the rest blank.
2) Stop returning to the begining of the library when display style or graphic/list is changed. (it is necessary when the sort changes). When I change these it it because I want to see what I'm looking at now in the new format.
Longer term
3)user control of column widths in the catalogue pages.
4) the same name, different author problem.
I wonder if for top rated authors "one hit wonders" should be excluded. Make a requirement of 5 books reviewed. Hope Mirrlees gets in on the strength of a single book "Lud in the Mist" which, while not a bad book, does not by itself make her a great author.
Jamie - I'm using LibraryThing to track ratings of books I've read but don't own. I'm more interested in using LibraryThing as a recommender than an inventory system, so I figure it'll work better for me if I catalog my "collection of memories" than my "collection of atoms."
Of course, I'm still a free member, so I'm not using any of my valuable spots to tell people how bad "Sphere" is. ;-) Yet.
I've had a couple of occasions recently when I've wanted to use the "Find on Amazon" feature for a book in someone elses library. However, I'm in the UK so the default to the US amazon makes this feature a bit useless for me. Could we have the option in our profile of which Amazon we want to default to. Another possiblity is allowing open source community plug ins, like those for the search bar on Firefox.
TCarter
The "completist" author calculation is somewhat odd. (This is not new, but this seemed a good place to mention it.) As calculated, it's more like a "prolific author" index, so people like "Carolyn Keene" show up just because there are so many Nancy Drew books, not because people necessarily are "completists" about her work. This is still an interesting statistic, but to me a "completist" author would be one where people tend to have all of their books if they have any (basically the current statistic normalized by the number of works for the author).
I get your point, but it's not prolificacy either. It's the average number of books held by people who hold any books by the author. This seems good to me. Even if the works system were definitive enough to handle it, going by "percent of books written by the author which are owned by people who own one book by the author" is crazy. Do we call Herodotus and Harper Lee "completist's authors" because everyone who owns any books by her owns all her books. Completism only works in conjunction with prolificacy.
How else should I calculate it?
Tim
Jamie asked:
"Am I the ONLY person using LibraryThing to catalog not only books I own (I haven't gotten far on that yet, actually), but also books I do not own (i.e. books I want to buy, books I want to get from the library, and books I have read but do not own)? Does anyone else do this?"
I certainly do! I use the @ prefix to flag all my personal, non-topic-related tags. Among other things, the @ sign indicates books that I've:
- lent to others (@lent to melody)
- borrowed from others (@melodys book)
- received as gifts (@holiday05)
- ordered but not yet received (@on order)
- decided I want, but haven't yet managed to acquire (@wishlist).
Frankly, the flexibility of this tag feature is one of the things that makes LibraryThing such a joy to me. I love the fact that when a friend borrows one of my books, it takes all of five seconds to log the event on LibraryThing. No muss, no fuss.
Some of these tags are temporary, obviously, while others may be permanent. (Hopefully not the "lent books" one, though!)
These doesn't include the occasional oddball category that I invent on the fly, such as @giftforfriend, which identifies a book that I bought as a gift for a friend but won't actually give to her until her birthday rolls around. (And I might just sneak a peek at it in the meantime...)
Well, Peter Jackson snuck on to the top list before, so as people add more dvds and music you are likely to get Nick Cave, Led Zeppelin and Kubrick, as well as God and Buddha.
I've been meaning to ask --
Is "top taggers" based on number of times a person has used tags, or on the number of different tags used? (I'm guessing it's the former.)
1. Would it be permissable to combine Eric Clapton and God?
2. Yes, it's the total number of tags. But, for the heck of it, I added your stats too (see beneath the current "top taggers"). It's interesting how it differs.
Tim
2. But, for the heck of it, I added your stats too (see beneath the current "top taggers"). It's interesting how it differs.
I really didn't mean to make more work for you! But thanks! It is interesting. I didn't know I had so many.
top 50 long tags...
Then, top 50 authors from outer space. Top illiterate authors. Top vegetables on authors diet.
Soooo useful.
I dunno. I think it's kinda fun... Only take a second.
>>The "completist" author calculation is somewhat odd.<<
I've said this before, but: it's the word "completist" that's misleading. You're measuring "addictiveness." Someone with dozens of Nancy Drew books is not nearly a completist, but they are arguably addicted.
I see your point about single-work authors. I think it's the word choice, rather than the calculation, that strikes me as odd. Maybe "most addictive authors", as suggested by grunin, is the way to go.
File under "Appreciating the Lesser Things in Life"
The mystery of the low rated books seems to relate to one or two people owning A LOT of books they don't like. I found that most of the one star ratings for Coulter, for example, were from a single user who owns 21 of her books but thinks they're just about all trash.
But the incredible bias against German Philosophers is disappointing.
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