University of Washington Researchers Analyzed Which Anthologized Writers and Books Get Checked Out the Most From Seattle Public Library

From UW:

Seattle Public Library, or SPL, is the only U.S. library system that makes its anonymized, granular checkout data public. Want to find out how many times people borrowed the e-book version of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” in May 2018? That data is available.

The hitch is that the library’s data set contains nearly 50 million rows, and a single title can appear variously. Morrison’s “Beloved,” for instance, is listed as “Beloved,” “Beloved (unabridged),” “Beloved : a novel / by Toni Morrison” and so on.

To track trends in the catalogue over the last 20 years, University of Washington researchers analyzed the checkout data of the 93 authors included in the post-1945 volume of “The Norton Anthology of American Literature.” It’s assigned in U.S. English classes more than virtually any other anthology, so it’s instrumental in standardizing what’s thought of as the contemporary American canon — the books and writers we’ve deemed culturally important.

The team found that among these vaunted writers — including Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, David Foster Wallace and Joan Didion — science fiction was particularly popular. Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler topped the list.

The team published its findings Nov. 21 in Computational Humanities Research 2025, and created an interactive website for exploring the data.

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In all the team looked at 1,603 works by the 93 authors, which were checked out a total of 980,620 times since 2005.

The 10 top authors were:

1. Ursula K. Le Guin
2. Octavia E. Butler
3. Louise Erdrich
4. N.K. Jemisin
5. Toni Morrison
6. Kurt Vonnegut
7. George Saunders
8. Philip K. Dick
9. Sherman Alexie
10. James Baldwin

The 10 top books were:

1. “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler
2. “Lincoln in the Bardo” by George Saunders
3. “The Fifth Season” by N.K. Jemisin
4. “The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen
5. “Kindred” by Octavia E. Butler
6. “Beloved” by Toni Morrison
7. “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin
8. “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie
9. “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion
10. “The Sentence” by Louise Erdrich

Learn More, Read the Complete  UW Post

Direct to Full Text Article: The Canon in Circulation: Tracking the Reception of Norton Anthology Authors in Library Checkout Data

Direct to Interactive Website

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