January 8, 2026
UW researchers analyzed which anthologized writers and books get checked out the most from Seattle Public Library
UW researchers analyzed the checkout data from the last 20 years of the 93 authors included in the post-1945 volume of “The Norton Anthology of American Literature,” which is assigned in U.S. English classes more than nearly any other anthology.Wikimedia Commons
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.
Related:
- Explore the data yourself on the project’s website
- Earlier research by the authors looks at how checkouts correspond with book sales and other library circulation
“It’s kind of mind-boggling and ironic that in this age of abundant data, we have so little data about what people are reading,” said senior author Melanie Walsh, a UW assistant professor in the Information School. “Book sales data is notoriously hard to get, particularly for researchers, so I’ve been obsessed with SPL’s data for years now. But extracting insights from it is actually a really hard computational and bibliographic modeling problem.”
To organize the data, the team used computational methods, such as stripping away subtitles and standardizing punctuation. They also manually identified things like translations of a work.
“We worked with the Norton anthology in part because it’s a small enough scale for us to handle,” said lead author Neel Gupta, a UW doctoral student in the Information School. “It allows us to have a ground truth to work off of. We can still put a human eye on things.”
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.
This graph follows how many times Ursula K. Le Guin’s books were borrowed since 2005.Gupta et al./Computational Humanities Research 2025
The 10 top authors were:
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- Octavia E. Butler
- Louise Erdrich
- N.K. Jemisin
- Toni Morrison
- Kurt Vonnegut
- George Saunders
- Philip K. Dick
- Sherman Alexie
- James Baldwin
The 10 top books were:
- “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler
- “Lincoln in the Bardo” by George Saunders
- “The Fifth Season” by N.K. Jemisin
- “The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen
- “Kindred” by Octavia E. Butler
- “Beloved” by Toni Morrison
- “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin
- “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie
- “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion
- “The Sentence” by Louise Erdrich
Researchers noted several trends that may have driven checkouts. In general, books with genre and sci-fi elements were some of the most popular.
“I found the prevalence of sci-fi books and writers really interesting,” Gupta said. “These are recent additions to the anthology, since sci-fi and genre fiction haven’t always been seen as important literature. So while it’s a bit unsurprising, it’s also striking to see that despite comprising a small portion of the anthology, these are the authors people are actually reading the most.”
News events also drove spikes in readership, such as film adaptations of James Baldwin’s “If Beale Street Could Talk” and Don DeLillo’s “White Noise,” or the deaths of authors such as Didion, Wallace, Morrison and Philip Roth.
The top book, “Parable of the Sower,” saw a huge spike in readership in 2024 — the year the futuristic novel is set, and the year SPL selected the novel for its Seattle Reads program.
“We’ve deemed these canonical authors important enough to continue reading, to continue teaching, to continue studying and talking about, so it’s fascinating to see who we’re actually reading and when,” Walsh said. “I find it very beautiful that after years of these big debates about diversifying the canon, the works that people are turning to the most are by women and Black and Native writers, who previously were not even included in these anthologies.”
Co-authors include Daniella Maor, Karalee Harris, Emily Backstrom and Hongyuan Dong, all students at the UW. This research was supported in part by the 2025 Humanities Data Science Summer Institute.
For more information, contact Walsh at melwalsh@uw.edu and Gupta at ngupta1@uw.edu.
Tag(s): Information School • Melanie Walsh • Neel Gupta
