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April 29, 2005
Image of the Week: Davy's Death
This picture came in the mail this morning from the Library of Congress. It’s one of the last pictures to come in for my forthcoming book, and also one of my favorites. It’s a drawing of Davy Crockett’s final moments at the Alamo. For more on its historical signifigance, check out the Image of the week page.
Posted by rickbeyer at 12:17 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2005
Amazon Analysis: "Text Stats" and more
Newsflash: Einstein is harder to read than Shakespeare. Tolstoy used more words per sentence than Mark Twain. “The Da Vinci Code” is suitable for readers with at least a 7th grade reading level. And the most common word in “The Education of Henry Adams” is: Adams. (It occurs 1072 times.)
This is just some of the strangely fascinating but not terribly meaningful information you can glean from the newest feature on Amazon.com. Some time ago the folks at Amazon began offering “Search Inside the Book,” making it possible to search the entire text of books whose publishers have allowed them to be scanned in. Now they are offering up some qualitative analysis on all that text that they have stored on their disks.
For each scanned book you can find a concordance—a list off the 100 most frequently used words in the text, excluding common words such as "of" and "it." The more a word is used, the bigger it appears. There is also a text analysis that spits out various ratings of the book’s readability and complexity, based on the average number of syllables per word and the average number of words per sentence.
Thus you can discover that according to the Flesch-Kincaid index, Shakespeare is suitable for anyone with a 4th grade reading level. This will undoubtedly come as a surprise to the countless high school students who have gotten bogged down in the bard’s work. But he was definitely a short-words-and-short-sentence guy, averaging about 9 words per sentence, with only 8% of his words at 3 syllables or more.
Einstein, on the other hand, averages 26.8 words per sentence, with 19% of the words being 3 syllables or more. (Too bad he insisted on using that five syllable word “relativity” so much). Thus the Flesch-Kincaid index suggests he is suitable reading for a junior in college. Hopefully a very smart junior.
The readability indexes make for interesting comparisons, as do such stats as words-per-dollar. “War and Peace” is a good value at 51,707 words per dollar, while Chris Van Allsburg’s “The Polar Express” has only 53 words per dollar. (What was he thinking, including all those pictures?). The concordances are less interesting, because they offer few surprises. The most common word in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” for instance is “Tom.” Shocking!
Amazon also now spotlights what it calls Statistically Improbable Phrases, or SIPs. If a phrase pops up a large number of times in a particular book, it gets listed; click on it and you can find other books that use the same phrase. One of the SIPs for “The Da Vinci Code” is “sacred feminine,” used by Dan Brown 26 times. With a click we can learn that it is also used 50 times in the spiritual text “The Return of the Mother,” which is only about 300 thousand places lower than “The Da Vinci Code” in Amazon’s book rankings.
Ah, the rankings. Authors are a chronically insecure lot. They are even more likely to dip into Amazon to check their ranking as they are to dip into the sherry to ease their pain. I have one friend who logs on every hour to track the rise and fall of his book. (OK, that’s actually me.) The text analysis features have opened up new vistas for anxiety and fretting. Imagine writers nervously comparing their readability compares to Stephen King, desperately trying to cram in more words per dollar than Harry Potter, or emulating the SIPs used by Dave Barry (“garbage barge,” “creamed chipped beef,” and “pig parts” to name a few.
Where does my own book, The Greatest Stories Never Told score? According to the Flesch-Kincaid index, it is suitable for someone with a 9th grade reading level, making it harder than Mark Twain, but easier than Tolstoy. (Please don’t tell PBS, which has recommended the book to children in grades 3-8.) It offers only 2866 words per dollar, and sadly, has no Statistically Improbable Phrases. None at all. I am in no way insecure about that, but you can be darn sure that in my next book, "Pig Parts: The Story of Creamed Chipped Beef," I won’t make the same mistake.
Posted by rickbeyer at 07:40 AM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2005
History Weekend/Image of the Week
Members of The Gloucester Hornpipe and Clog Society playing at the Beyer family’s 4th semi-annual Patriots Day Colonial Costume Party, which we held last Saturday. We live in Lexington Massachusetts, the town where the American Revolution began. Every other year (or thereabouts) my wife Marilyn and I and invite our friends to come over in costume to celebrate Patriots Day and the events of April 19th, 1775. We turn off the lights and light the candles, serve colonial era food and drink, and listen to period music. For more on the party and the music, check out the Image of the week page.
We also got up at 3:30 AM on Monday,(Patriots Day), put on our costumes, grabbed our lanterns, and walked to Lexington center for the annual reenactment of the Battle of Lexington.
Believe it or not, thousands of people come to this pre-dawn event every year, and you have to get there well before 5 AM to have any chance of getting a decent view. It is amazingly emotional, from the moment when you first catch a glimpse of the redcoats marching down the main street of Lexington toward the green, where a few dozen ragged militamen nervously await. You can feel the tension rise as the British officers shout at the colonials to disperse, and the colonials, scared, unsure, and awed by the wave upon wave of scarlet ranks, start to backpedal. Then, as happened 230 years ago, a shot rings out, no one knows from where. Suddenly fire breaks out from both sides, the British soldiers charge, and the war that will lead to American independence has begun. The re-enactment is done so well it takes your breath away.
I did end up doing the booksigning at the Waldenbooks later that day in costume—it was fun!
Posted by rickbeyer at 07:53 AM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2005
Martin Van Buren
I just completed Ted Widmer’s new biography of President Martin Van Buren , in which he tries to rescue this forgotten president from obscurity and give him much of the credit for creating the modern Democratic party. A tall order, considering that most people probably consider Martin (His enemies called him "Matty") Van Buren about as interesting as paint drying on a wall--if they stop to consider him at all. (I’m sure an expose on Abigail van Buren—“Dear Abbey”—would be far more likely to generate book sales.) But in fact it is a very engaging book, and well worth reading, though Van Buren is a curiously elusive subject.
Mr. Widmer’s book-jacket bio notes his work as an aide to Bill Clinton and the fact that he is a professor of History at Washington College in Maryland, but oddly enough, fails to mention that a) like myself, he is a graduate of the Gordon School in East Providence Rhode Island, or b) he was one of the founders of The Upper Crust, a Boston area punk band whose members appear in baroque dress portraying 18th century Lords. (Widmer, who as far as I know is no longer with the band, was known as Lord Rockingham). It is my pleasure to correct these omissions here.
Posted by rickbeyer at 08:16 AM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2005
Surrendering to Creationism
Scientific American: Okay, We Give Up
We feel so ashamed
Posted by rickbeyer at 08:13 AM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2005
Image of the Week: Godspeed
This is an image from the documentary production side of my life. Plate of Peas is doing a program for about the contruction of a replica of the Godspeed, one of the three ships that carried colonists to Jamestown in 1607. It follows another Jamestown documentary we produced for The History Channel last year, Secrets of Jamestown. For more info check out the Image of the Week page.
Posted by rickbeyer at 08:20 AM | Comments (0)