Abstract
Literary critics and historians often interpret authors and authors' works as more or less significant, but are reluctant to quantify those works. The interdisciplinary field of creativity studies, however, poses methods of quantifying the eminence of an author's works. This study uses four measures from that field (anthology entries, scholarly citations, entries in books of quotations, and auction sale records) and one measure from the fields of computational linguistics and data mining (ngrams using millions of books digitized by Google) to assess the eminence of John Milton's thirty-one prose works and their relation to his greater achievement in epic poetry. These measures indicate the singular eminence of Areopagitica, Milton's 1644 tract on the liberty of unlicensed printing.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 174-184 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Historical Methods |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 3 2015 |
Fingerprint
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- History
Cite this
}
The Singularity of Areopagitica : A Quantitative Analysis of John Milton's Prose Works. / Beck, Jeffrey P.
In: Historical Methods, Vol. 48, No. 3, 03.07.2015, p. 174-184.Research output: Contribution to journal › Review article
TY - JOUR
T1 - The Singularity of Areopagitica
T2 - A Quantitative Analysis of John Milton's Prose Works
AU - Beck, Jeffrey P.
PY - 2015/7/3
Y1 - 2015/7/3
N2 - Literary critics and historians often interpret authors and authors' works as more or less significant, but are reluctant to quantify those works. The interdisciplinary field of creativity studies, however, poses methods of quantifying the eminence of an author's works. This study uses four measures from that field (anthology entries, scholarly citations, entries in books of quotations, and auction sale records) and one measure from the fields of computational linguistics and data mining (ngrams using millions of books digitized by Google) to assess the eminence of John Milton's thirty-one prose works and their relation to his greater achievement in epic poetry. These measures indicate the singular eminence of Areopagitica, Milton's 1644 tract on the liberty of unlicensed printing.
AB - Literary critics and historians often interpret authors and authors' works as more or less significant, but are reluctant to quantify those works. The interdisciplinary field of creativity studies, however, poses methods of quantifying the eminence of an author's works. This study uses four measures from that field (anthology entries, scholarly citations, entries in books of quotations, and auction sale records) and one measure from the fields of computational linguistics and data mining (ngrams using millions of books digitized by Google) to assess the eminence of John Milton's thirty-one prose works and their relation to his greater achievement in epic poetry. These measures indicate the singular eminence of Areopagitica, Milton's 1644 tract on the liberty of unlicensed printing.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84937693387&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84937693387&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/01615440.2015.1028858
DO - 10.1080/01615440.2015.1028858
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:84937693387
VL - 48
SP - 174
EP - 184
JO - Historical Methods
JF - Historical Methods
SN - 0161-5440
IS - 3
ER -