In the 1952 a set of books called the Great Books of the Western World was published. It was supposed to represent the best of Western literature and enable the reader to further their liberal arts education. Sixty volumes in all, it included works by Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton, Galileo, Kepler, Melville, Darwin, etc. (See Appendix A.) These great books were selected based on the way they discussed a set of 102 “great ideas” such as art, astronomy, beauty, evil, evolution, mind, nature, poetry, revolution, science, will, wisdom, etc. (See Appendix B.) How “great” are these books, and how “great” are the ideas expressed in them?

Given full text versions of these books it would be almost trivial to use the “great ideas” as input and apply relevancy ranking algorithms against the texts thus creating a sort of score — a “Great Ideas Coefficient”. Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency is a well-established algorithm for computing just this sort of thing:

relevancy = ( c / t ) * log( d / f )

where:

• c = number of times a given word appears in a document
• t = total number of words in a document
• d = total number of documents in a corpus
• f = total number of documents containing a given word

Thus, to calculate our Great Ideas Coefficient we would sum the relevancy score for each “great idea” for each “great book”. Plato’s Republic might have a cumulative score of 525 while Aristotle’s On The History Of Animals might have a cumulative score of 251. Books with a larger Coefficient could be considered greater. Given such a score a person could measure a book’s “greatness”. We could then compare the score to the scores of other books. Which book is the “greatest”? We could compare the score to other measurable things such as book’s length or date to see if there were correlations. Are “great books” longer or shorter than others? Do longer books contain more “great ideas”? Are there other books that were not included in the set that maybe should have been included? Instead of summing each relevancy score, maybe the “great ideas” can be grouped into gross categories such as humanities or sciences, and we can sum those scores instead. Thus we may be able to say one set of book is “great” when it comes the expressing the human condition and these others are better at describing the natural world. We could ask ourselves, which number of books represents the best mixture of art and science because their humanities score is almost equal to its sciences score. Expanding the scope beyond general education we could create an alternative set of “great ideas”, say for biology or mathematics or literature, and apply the same techniques to other content such as full text scholarly journal literatures.

The initial goal of this study is to examine the “greatness” of the Great Books, but the ultimate goal is to learn whether or not this quantitative process can be applied other bodies of literature and ultimately assist the student/scholar in their studies/research

Wish me luck.

Appendix A – Authors and titles in the Great Books series

• Aeschylus – Prometheus Bound; Seven Against Thebes; The Oresteia; The Persians; The Suppliant Maidens
• American State Papers – Articles of Confederation; Declaration of Independence; The Constitution of the United States of America
• Apollonius – On Conic Sections
• Aquinas – Summa Theologica
• Archimedes – Book of Lemmas; Measurement of a Circle; On Conoids and Spheroids; On Floating Bodies; On Spirals; On the Equilibrium of Planes; On the Sphere and Cylinder; The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems; The Quadrature of the Parabola; The Sand-Reckoner
• Aristophanes – Ecclesiazousae; Lysistrata; Peace; Plutus; The Acharnians; The Birds; The Clouds; The Frogs; The Knights; The Wasps; Thesmophoriazusae
• Aristotle – Categories; History of Animals; Metaphysics; Meteorology; Minor biological works; Nicomachean Ethics; On Generation and Corruption; On Interpretation; On Sophistical Refutations; On the Gait of Animals; On the Generation of Animals; On the Motion of Animals; On the Parts of Animals; On the Soul; Physics; Poetics; Politics; Posterior Analytics; Prior Analytics; Rhetoric; The Athenian Constitution; Topics
• Augustine – On Christian Doctrine; The City of God; The Confessions
• Aurelius – The Meditations
• Bacon – Advancement of Learning; New Atlantis; Novum Organum
• Berkeley – The Principles of Human Knowledge
• Boswell – The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
• Cervantes – The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha
• Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
• Copernicus – On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres
• Dante – The Divine Comedy
• Darwin – The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex; The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
• Descartes – Discourse on the Method; Meditations on First Philosophy; Objections Against the Meditations and Replies; Rules for the Direction of the Mind; The Geometry
• Dostoevsky – The Brothers Karamazov
• Epictetus – The Discourses
• Euclid – The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements
• Euripides – Alcestis; Andromache; Bacchantes; Cyclops; Electra; Hecuba; Helen; Heracleidae; Heracles Mad; Hippolytus; Ion; Iphigeneia at Aulis; Iphigeneia in Tauris; Medea; Orestes; Phoenician Women; Rhesus; The Suppliants; Trojan Women
• Faraday – Experimental Researches in Electricity
• Fielding – The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
• Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
• Freud – A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Civilization and Its Discontents; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety; Instincts and Their Vicissitudes; New Introductory Lectures on Psycho- Analysis; Observations on “Wild” Psycho-Analysis; On Narcissism; Repression; Selected Papers on Hysteria; The Ego and the Id; The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy; The Interpretation of Dreams; The Origin and Development of Psycho- Analysis; The Sexual Enlightenment of Children; The Unconscious; Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
• Galen – On the Natural Faculties
• Galileo – Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences
• Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
• Goethe – Faust
• Hamilton – The Federalist
• Harvey – On the Circulation of Blood; On the Generation of Animals; On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
• Hegel – The Philosophy of History; The Philosophy of Right
• Herodotus – The History
• Hippocrates – Works
• Hobbes – Leviathan
• Homer – The Iliad; The Odyssey
• Hume – An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
• James – The Principles of Psychology
• Kant – Excerpts from The Metaphysics of Morals; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals; General Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals; Preface and Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics with a note on Conscience; The Critique of Judgement; The Critique of Practical Reason; The Critique of Pure Reason; The Science of Right
• Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; The Harmonies of the World
• Lavoisier – Elements of Chemistry
• Locke – A Letter Concerning Toleration; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay
• Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
• Machiavelli – The Prince
• Marx – Capital
• Marx and Engels – Manifesto of the Communist Party
• Melville – Moby Dick; or, The Whale
• Mill – Considerations on Representative Government; On Liberty; Utilitarianism
• Milton – Areopagitica; English Minor Poems; Paradise Lost; Samson Agonistes
• Montaigne – Essays
• Montesquieu – The Spirit of the Laws
• Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics; Twelfth Night; or, What You Will
  Christian Huygens; Treatise on Light
• Nicomachus – Introduction to Arithmetic
• Pascal – Pensées; Scientific and mathematical essays; The Provincial Letters
• Plato – Apology; Charmides; Cratylus; Critias; Crito; Euthydemus; Euthyphro; Gorgias; Ion; Laches; Laws; Lysis; Meno; Parmenides; Phaedo; Phaedrus; Philebus; Protagoras; Sophist; Statesman; Symposium; The Republic; The Seventh Letter; Theaetetus; Timaeus
• Plotinus – The Six Enneads
• Plutarch – The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
• Ptolemy – The Almagest
• Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
• Rousseau – A Discourse on Political Economy; A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality; The Social Contract
• Shakespeare – A Midsummer-Night’s Dream; All’s Well That Ends Well; Antony and Cleopatra; As You Like It; Coriolanus; Cymbeline; Julius Caesar; King Lear; Love’s Labour’s Lost; Macbeth; Measure For Measure; Much Ado About Nothing; Othello, the Moor of Venice; Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Romeo and Juliet; Sonnets; The Comedy of Errors; The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth; The First Part of King Henry the Fourth; The First Part of King Henry the Sixth; The Life and Death of King John; The Life of King Henry the Fifth; The Merchant of Venice; The Merry Wives of Windsor; The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth; The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth; The Taming of the Shrew; The Tempest; The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth; The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; The Tragedy of King Richard the Second; The Tragedy of Richard the Third; The Two Gentlemen of Verona; The Winter’s Tale; Timon of Athens; Titus Andronicus; Troilus and Cressida
• Smith – An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
• Sophocles – Ajax; Electra; Philoctetes; The Oedipus Cycle; The Trachiniae
• Spinoza – Ethics
• Sterne – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
• Swift – Gulliver’s Travels
• Tacitus – The Annals; The Histories
• Thucydides – The History of the Peloponnesian War
• Tolstoy – War and Peace
• Virgil – The Aeneid; The Eclogues; The Georgics

Appendix B – The “great” ideas

angel • animal • aristocracy • art • astronomy • beauty • being • cause • chance • change • citizen • constitution • courage • custom & convention • definition • democracy • desire • dialectic • duty • education • element • emotion • eternity • evolution • experience • family • fate • form • god • good & evil • government • habit • happiness • history • honor • hypothesis • idea • immortality • induction • infinity • judgment • justice • knowledge • labor • language • law • liberty • life & death • logic • love • man • mathematics • matter • mechanics • medicine • memory & imagination • metaphysics • mind • monarchy • nature • necessity & contingency • oligarchy • one & many • opinion • opposition • philosophy • physics • pleasure & pain • poetry • principle • progress • prophecy • prudence • punishment • quality • quantity • reasoning • relation • religion • revolution • rhetoric • same & other • science • sense • sign & symbol • sin • slavery • soul • space • state • temperance • theology • time • truth • tyranny • universal & particular • virtue & vice • war & peace • wealth • will • wisdom • world

Tags: digital humanities, great books

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