The Open Syllabus Project Gathers 1,000,000 Syllabi from Universities & Reveals the 100 Most Frequently-Taught Books

Ear­li­er this week, we high­light­ed The 20 Most Influ­en­tial Aca­d­e­m­ic Books of All Time, accord­ing to a recent poll con­duct­ed in Britain.

Now comes the Syl­labus Explor­er, a new web­site cre­at­ed by the Open Syl­labus Project at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty. Impres­sive­ly, the Syl­labus Explor­er has gath­ered 1,ooo,ooo+ syl­labi pub­lished on uni­ver­si­ty web­sites, then extract­ed and aggre­gat­ed the data found in those doc­u­ments, all for one rea­son: to deter­mine the most­ly fre­quent­ly-taught books in uni­ver­si­ty class­rooms.

Writ­ing in The New York Times, Joe Kara­ga­n­is and David McClure, two direc­tors at the Open Syl­labus Project, explained that the Syl­labus Explor­er “is most­ly a tool for count­ing how often texts [have been] assigned over the past decade.” Using fre­quen­cy as a proxy for influ­ence, the Project assigns an over­all ‘Teach­ing Score’ to each text, pro­vid­ing anoth­er met­ric for gaug­ing the impact of cer­tain books.

Accord­ing to Kara­ga­n­is and McClure, the “tra­di­tion­al West­ern canon dom­i­nates the top 100, with Plato’s Repub­lic at No. 2, The Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo at No. 3, and Franken­stein at No. 5, fol­lowed by Aristotle’s Ethics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Oedi­pus and Ham­let.” What’s No. 1? The Ele­ments of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. (Find them all in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.)

As for the most fre­quent­ly-taught nov­els writ­ten dur­ing the past 50 years, they add:

Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” ranks first, at No. 43, fol­lowed by William Gibson’s “Neu­ro­mancer,” Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” Ms. Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” San­dra Cisneros’s “The House on Man­go Street,” Anne Moody’s “Com­ing of Age in Mis­sis­sip­pi,” Leslie Mar­mon Silko’s “Cer­e­mo­ny” and Alice Walker’s “The Col­or Pur­ple.”

It’s worth not­ing that, despite its name, the Syl­labi Explor­er does­n’t cur­rent­ly give you access to actu­al syl­labi for rea­sons hav­ing to do with pri­va­cy and copy­right. You only get access to the sta­tis­ti­cal aggre­ga­tion of data extract­ed from the syl­labi. That’s where things stand right now.

When you vis­it The Syl­labi Explor­er, check out this visu­al graph and be sure to zoom into the visu­als.

If you’re a teacher, you can share your syl­labi here. If you have mon­ey to spare, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to this valu­able open source resource.

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