The primary purpose of the project is to determine whether or not “greatness” can be measured. I am using the Great Books of the Western World as a sort of control group for this study. Alas, Atlas Shrugged is not apart of the Great Books. The survey is a way of testing my mathematical model. So far the results are not conclusive.

In a previous posting I describe how I counted the number of times each of the Great Ideas appeared in each of the Great Books. [1] From that analysis it would be possible for me to objectively add tags to the books based on the “Great Ideas Coefficient”. Thus, I would be able to assign the word “love” to Shakespeare’s Sonnets and “war” to Aristophanes’s Peace. I would then be able to juxtapose works associated with any of the Great Ideas.

But according to Hutchins, one of the characteristics of “greatness” is the ability of a work to describe and discuss a wide range of ideas, not just a few. If this is the case, then I need to juxtapose every work to every other work with every idea. Doing the random thing covers all of those options.

Furthermore, there is absolutely nothing wrong with answering “I don’t know and/or neither”. Since I am only in interested in which work is greater than the other a non-response does not effect the tabulation. I don’t need to know what people don’t know. I only need to know what people do know or think they know.

Finally, the purpose of the survey is to determine if there is a correlation between my Great Ideas Coefficient and people’s opinions. So far the correlation is weak but I figure I don’t have nearly enough survey data to make a real evaluation.

Again, thanks for the feedback. The whole thing is an digital humanities investigation in a crowd sourced context.

[1] – http://bit.ly/cMBjEO

I work in reference at a library, and I’m also an alumna of St. John’s College, which is based on the Great Books program, so I found your experiment interesting on two levels.

Thanks much