Editions
Humanities · collecting
The Canon Issue
How lists become memory — Gutenberg, Pantheon, Rolling Stone, and literary fame.
GUTENBERG: English Holds 72% of the Shelf
English titles hold 72% of indexed Gutenberg availability; 19th-century fiction peaks at 2.8× other eras; adventure and gothic subjects adapt 3× faster. LCSH: 69,027 Headings Anchor Gutenberg's Core
LCSH accounts for 69% of subject headings; PS (American literature) appears 4,684 times — concentration defines the reusable public-domain canon. PANTHEON: Power, Art, and Science Dominate MIT's Pantheon of Global Memory
85,000+ biographies in MIT's Pantheon dataset reveal which occupations and cities compound fame across languages—and which achievements remain local. ALBUMS: Rolling Stone's 2003 Canon, Rank by Rank
The 2003 Rolling Stone list puts median rank at 250; "Touch" sits at 500, studio albums dominate, and 1955–2019 releases populate the canon. SHERLOCK: Twelve Words per Tokenized Record
Tokenized Holmes corpus from TidyTuesday shows median 12.0 words, mean 10.9, with top five titles holding 34% of aggregate count. NOVELS: Victorian Authors Own the Christmas Canon
A Gutenberg holiday corpus shows a median author birthdate of 1859 and Dickens as the most common name. MEDIUM: Do Four-Minute Medium Posts Earn More Claps?
78,388 Medium articles from 2017–2018 show median reading time of 4 minutes; scatter plots reveal no clean law linking length to applause.