Centennials, part II

So I just looked at patterns of commemoration for a few famous anniversaries. This is, for some people, kind of interesting–how does the publishing industry focus in on certain figures to create news or resurgences of interest in them?  I love the way we get excited about the civil war sesquicentennial now, or the Darwin/Lincoln year last year.

I was asking if this spike in mentions of Thoreau in 1917, is extraordinary or merely high.

Emerson (1903) doesn’t seem to have much a spike–he’s up in 1904 with everyone, although Hawthorne, whose centenary is 1904, isn’t up very much.

Can we look at the centennial spikes for a lot of authors? Yes. The best way would be to use a biographical dictionary or wikipedia or something, but I can also just use the years built into some of my author metadata to get a rough list of authors born between 1730 and 1822, so they can have a centenary during my sample. A little grepping gets us down to thousand or so authors. Here are the ten with the most books, to check for reliability:

1   Thackeray  1811               86
4      Holmes  1809               52
9      Darwin  1809               30
10    Dickens  1812               30
14   Whittier  1807               29
15  Hawthorne  1804               28
21    Spencer  1820               25
22    Tyndall  1820               25
23    Holland  1819               24
26 Longfellow  1807               22

So who has the biggest centenaries? The ‘ Percent ’ column is the percentage of all mentions of an author that occur in his or her (hello, Harriet Beecher Stowe!) centenary. I’m only applying this to the 200 most represented authors. So Thoreau is indeed remarkable in having 11% of his mentions in his centennial year. There are a lot of other big centennials in the 90s and aughts, and only one from the first half of our sample.

Percent       Author Birth Year
1  12.305728     Gieseler       1792
2  11.053941      Thoreau       1817
3   7.580752    Thackeray       1811
4   5.753147      Colburn       1793
5   5.594953        Stowe       1811
6   4.320671 Woodhouselee       1747
7   4.209995        Lewes       1817
8   3.640463      Dickens       1812
9   3.634805      Emerson       1803
10  3.533058      Haswell       1809

Do the centenary scores increase as time goes on?

> cor(centenary.scores[,3],centenary.scores[,1])
[1] 0.02625526

Emphatically they do not. It’s unusualto get a correlation score so close to zero on this kind of data. But that may just be because most authors don’t get centenary celebrations, in which case most of their mentions were probably closer to when they were alive. Or for some, like Darwin, the centennial just doesn’t matter compared to the other controversies that get kicked up around the name at other points in time.

What if we did a different set of centennials: say, presidents? I can just pull their dates off wikipedia and sort the percentage of their mentions that come in the centenary year:

So any number below 1 means their centenary year had a below average number of mentions. I knew the Lincoln centenary was a big deal, but Fillmore? Who knew? A graphic like this could be good for teaching if we want to talk about, say, the eclipse of Grant, who gets a smaller boost than Hayes in 1922.  I could go on, but I think it’s clear that there’s some interesting stuff about not just publishing practices, but maybe larger questions of reputation.

For the record, there is a positive correlation here:

> cor(as.numeric(presidents[,2]),result)
[1] 0.4922704

But it’s mostly driven by the lack of centenaries for the founding fathers, which I think is something else entirely.