Top 500 “Greatest” Novels (1021-2015)
“We wondered about the implications of this claim and about what it means to base ideas of “literary greatness” on the number of libraries that hold a particular work. How do historical biases in systems of literary production and preservation figure into these kinds of claims? Which libraries’ records are included in the data? And how do we even define what counts as a novel?”.
Why this project?
We chose this project because the concept of literary greatness, and the bias surrounding it, is fascinating. We wanted to dig more into this research.
The 4 W’s
- Who made it: The dataset was compiled by OCLC (the non-profit library cooperative) and then curated for context by Anna Preus and Aashna Sheth.
- When it started / published: The contextual dataset was published July 1, 2024.
- Where it is housed: The dataset lives at the Responsible Datasets in Context website (“Top 500 ‘Greatest’ Novels (1021-2015)”).
- When it ended: It appears to be ongoing, it is still being maintained