Hard data, hard times

Charles Dickens would not approve of Big Data; he had no time at all for Mr Gradgrind’s view that ‘You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them’, nor for his efforts to turn his son Tom into a scientist by having the boy trained to mathematical exactness.

Dickens had no respect at all for the output of Victorian collators & compilers of statistics in the form of Parliamentary Blue Books.

Whatever they could prove (which is usually anything you like), they proved there, in an army constantly strengthening by the arrival of new recruits … the most complicated social questions were cast up, got into exact totals, and finally settled - if those concerned could only have been brought to know it. As if an astronomical observatory should be made without any windows, and the astronomer within should arrange the starry universe solely by pen, ink, and paper, so Mr. Gradgrind, in his Observatory (and there are many like it), had no need to cast an eye upon the teeming myriads of human beings around him, but could settle all their destinies on a slate, and wipe out all their tears with one dirty little bit of sponge.

Heaven knows what Dickens would think of the idea of settling issues of social policy through the mechanism of the randomised controlled trial
Well, actually he gave us a pretty good clue, in the words of young Tom Gradgrind, failed mathematician:
'I wish I could collect all the Facts we hear so much about,' said Tom, spitefully setting his teeth, 'and all the Figures, and all the people who found them out: and I wish I could put a thousand barrels of gunpowder under them, and blow them all up together! '

Those Blue Books are now regarded as invaluable social documents by many, but there will always be those who  place more value on the story than on statistics.

Link
Project Gutenberg: Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Public library lending

The annual ‘best seller’ list for UK public libraries has just been published.

Much was made of the enduring popularity of the novels of Danielle Steel, whose books have been featured in the lists for each of the last 30 years. Her books were borrowed almost a million times last year alone.

Jack Malvern, writing in The Times, interpreted this as the ‘British reading public’ showing what they think of literary critics & cultural commentators who mock her ‘formulaic stories’.

Well maybe.

But that figure needs to be seen in the context of the total number of loans made by UK public libraries last year.

The novels of Danielle Steel accounted for  0.3% of a total of more than one quarter of a billion loans (287,505,000 to be more precise – rather more than the 209,000,000 books bought by consumers in 2011 according to figures from the Publishers Association).

The best seller lists are compiled from figures which are used to make Public Lending Right (PLR) payments to authors. From which we can calculate that, with a total of £6.4m at a rate of 6.2p per loan, only some 100 million (roughly one-third of all library loans) attract the payment. Part of the gap is explained by the fact that there is a cap of £6,600 on the payment to any one author (ie they are not paid for more than about 1 million loans of their books in any one year), and the rest is made up of books by authors who do not qualify for PLR.

Links
What is PLR?
CIPFA national library survey