| If anyone has good data/analysis of banned books, please share it. While looking, I only found PEN's dataset: https://pen.org/book-bans/2023-banned-book-list/ And the only comprehensive analysis I found was their analysis of that dataset: https://pen.org/report/book-bans-pressure-to-censor/ Any other analyses I found used that dataset. I don't distrust PEN, but they surely have some bias, and more sources is always better. Unfortunately, unless I'm missing something, they don't look at the grade levels that books were banned at, which seems very important. Banning a book is very different if it's for grade, middle, or high school. Middle and high schoolers are thinking about sex, talking about sex, and having sex, so the standards for what is appropriate should change substantially based on the age of the students. And of course, it's very difficult to do a comprehensive analysis of "how sexual" a book is. There are books with lots of literary value that have a few paragraphs that are very explicit, but the rest of the book is not. If you only read the explicit paragraphs, you would not have the context or know what the rest of the book is like. The context of a whole novel around explicit content makes it very different than when the explicit part is considered in isolation. It doesn't help that it's hard to make our own judgements about how graphic something banned for "sexual content" is, because the offending content can't be posted online for copyright reasons. > As for parents getting thrown out of school board meetings for merely reading out loud (to adults!) their content, this is well documented One of those videos is not about books at all, it is about someone wanting to quote one of the school board members who said something sexual. This doesn't invalidate everything you said, but I point this out to demonstrate to you that you are not thinking about or analyzing this clearly or with rigor. Yes, of course there are instances of age-inappropriate books with little literary value that are sensibly banned, but pointing to a few such instances and extrapolating that to "most banned books are pornographic" is obviously bad methodology. I'd sure love to use an LLM to analyze the banned book data along with the full text of the books, but that would take quite a bit of time and money. |