New Yorker Fiction, by the Numbers

New Yorker Fiction, by the Numbers

Interesting. Read the full article from here. A few portions of this article are shown below:

Katherine L. Milkman, 22, decided to turn rigorous mathematical analytics on an even more mystical topic: the selection of short fiction for The New Yorker.

Ms. Milkman, who has a minor in American studies, read 442 stories printed in The New Yorker from Oct. 5, 1992, to Sept. 17, 2001, and built a substantial database. She then constructed a series of rococo mathematical tests to discern, among other things, whether certain fiction editors at the magazine had a specific impact on the type of fiction that was published, the sex of authors and the race of characters. The study was long on statistics and short on epiphanies: one main conclusion was that male editors generally publish male authors who write about male characters who are supported by female characters.

In applying numerically based analysis to literary matters, Ms. Milkman's work was something of a micro-execution of the controversial text-free literary investigations of Prof. Franco Moretti of Stanford, in which he examined the broad scope of literary history by the numbers, tracking the birth and denouement of various genres based on statistics. Longtime adherents to canonical literary thought were appalled by Professor Moretti's by-the-numbers approach to the study of literature, something Ms. Milkman came to be familiar with.

Among Ms. Milkman's least shocking findings was that characters in New Yorker fiction tend to live in the same places New Yorker readers do, not the United States as a whole. (One could imagine if the same analytics were applied to New Yorker cartoons, where the Upper East Side is more robustly represented than all the middle places put together.)

In a conclusion that will probably cause few readers to spill their evening tea, she states that "quantitative analyses revealed that New Yorker characters are not representative of Americans or New York State residents in terms of their race."