REFLECTION:

Although the visualizations of the project have not yet been finalized, the information they do present answers the original query of the project. While there are clusters of authors who were born and/or died in Asia - in addition to a handful of authors who were born and/or died in South America, Africa, and Oceania - the bulk of the authors are still from Western countries. Additionally, birth or death location does not necessarily correlate to ethnicity or race, as some authors may have been born in countries under European colonization (i.e. Rudyard Kipling, born in Mumbai, India in 1865, had white British parents). It is worth noting that many of the authors from China and Russia did not write entire books published as NYRB classics, but rather wrote individual works included as collections of works published as one NYRB classic.

Similar findings can be found by looking at the language visualizations. While the languages of Japanese, Arabic, Turkish, and Kannada are present in the dataset, English still represents the most dominant language at 56%, followed by French (12%), German (10%), and Russian (6%). Again, it is important to note that many of the authors from Russia did not write entire books published as NYRB classics, but rather wrote individual works included as collections of works published as one NYRB classic. Languages within the Germanic family dominate the books at 66% followed by Italic languages (20%), Slavic languages (8%), Finno-Ugric languages (2%), and Sinitic languages (1%). Eastern Altaic (Japanese), Hellenic (Greek), West Semitic (Arabic), Indo-Iranian (Hindi), Tamil-Kannada (Kannada), Turkic (Turkish) each represented less than 1% of the languages of the collection. One book contained works in multiple languages, generically categorized as "Multiple Languages", which also represented less than 1% of the languages of the collection.

An interesting circumstance that the language data does not tell us is whether some authors, for whom English was not their first language, wrote in English. This may be a way for authors to more easily distribute their work to English-speaking markets without need for translation. The currently data does not speak to this issue, but trending pressure to write in English could be worth noting in future data sets like this. This project’s data set represents only a few ways in which to explore some new classics. Other data points that could be of interest are original publication dates, gender, race and ethnicity, and religion. So far, it is clear that the New York Review of Books Classics series favors European authorship, but that could change in the future as new voices add their own classics to the list.