immanence

Both Open Culture and The New York Times have reported on the Open Syllabus Project, which has tallied over a million college course syllabi to determine the 10,000 or so most commonly assigned texts.

The project also provides a cluster map of these texts, which is probably less interesting (and more confusing) in its large form than when one pokes into it from a given text — to find, for instance, that The Communist Manifesto (at #3) is assigned most commonly with Capital, The Social Contract, and Leviathan; Thoreau’s Walden (#31) with texts by Emerson; and Barbara Bush’s The White House (at #69?!) with William Rehnquist’s The Supreme Court, Time, Inc.’s World War Two, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf (interesting…).

(Meanwhile, The Guardian recently polled booksellers, librarians, publishers, and the public to create a list of the 20 most influential academic books of all time. The overlap between the two lists is interesting, even if the Guardian‘s methodology leaves a great deal of room for improvement. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species topped that list, followed by The Communist Manifesto, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Plato’s Republic, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.)

Here are a few quick observations about the Open Syllabus Project mega-list.

1. Only three books that appear on my own list of “33⅓ Environmental Studies Greats” appear in the top 250 or so most commonly required college readings. They are Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (at #27, but its multiple editions would raise the book up the list if they were included in the same count), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (#96), and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (#232, also with multiple listings).

2. Others that could reasonably be included in an “environmental” list include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (#5), the already mentioned Walden (#31), Garrett Hardin’s article “The Tragedy of the Commons” (#54), Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (#131), Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (#147), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (#175). But including literary works like Shelley’s, Whitman’s, Silko’s, and even Emerson’s here gives you some indication of how debatable the criteria might be for what constitutes “environmental.” (Should we include Heart of Darkness, Plato’s Republic, Marx’s Capital, or for that matter Neil Campbell’s Biology, which somehow strikingly made it into fourth place?)

3. Among the top humanists of the last century, Michel Foucault again wins handily by any measure, with three of his books attaining a “score” of 83% or higher, and two of 95% or higher. Few others from that list of 30 authors come close to Foucault, and only Edward Said’s Orientalism scores higher (98.6) than Foucault’s top publication, Power (96.9). If we draw the boundaries back another century, Marx’s Communist Manifesto would triumph with a 99.7 score (third place, as mentioned), and The Origin of Species would come into the very high 90s (96.8 plus about 1000 other citations in multiple editions).

4. Filtering the mega-list by fields, countries, and U.S. states leads to some interesting observations as well. (Filtering by Vermont, for instance, we find Ellen Langer’s 1947 book Mindfulness in fourth place of all assigned readings. Meanwhile, Thomas Frank’s troubled Kansas surprises with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in top spot. I suspect we’re getting into some very limited statistical samples there…) There is no “environment” field, alas.

If you play with the list and find anything of interest, feel free to share in the comments below.