Forgotten people

Lorcan was in my office looking at Identity timelines recently.  It is easy to find people whose publications are more common now than they used to be, probably because of the huge growth in publication in general, coupled with an increase in higher education (or third level education as Lorcan put it).  It's a bit harder to think of someone that is no longer popular.  So I wrote a little program to look for us.

There are many thousands of people with more publications before 1800 than after, and even around a 150 people who have at least 100 manifestations in WorldCat and a publication history that shows more published in the 17th than the 18th, more in the 18th than the 19th and more in the 19th than the 20th century.  Here are a few examples:

Gilbert Burnet, a Scottish theologian and historian

Henry Hammond, an English clergyman

John Tillotson, an English Archbishop

Charles Drelincourt, a French Protestant

Philippe Labbe, a French Jesuit

Well, almost forgotten.  Most of the 150 have Wikipedia articles about them.

--Th

Comments

[Jakob]

How many percentage of the people have more/less publications during their lifetime than afterwards? Which people have been forgotten and had a revival during the 1960s? I think this is just a glimpse to Semantic Web (with a SPARQL-Interface to WorldCat Identities people may answer such questions, but this is for 2008/2009).

By the way if you catch the year of birth and dead with substring-before(substring-after(//pnkey,'$'),' ') and substring-after(substring-after(//pnkey,'$'),' ') then you can mark publications during lifetime of a person in a different color in the dateLoop-template.

[Jodi Schneider]

What's the earliest known author in WorldCat?

Identities is a great resource. I'd love to see more entrees for browsing in it.

[Thom]

I don't have a good answer for who is the first author. All the old dates I see in WorldCat look suspect to me.

We're open to suggestions for other ways to access the pages or otherwise navigate once you've found one.

--Th

[K.G. Schneider]

Ok, Identities will continue to irk me until it shows my real publication history, but I post here because I am looking for information on WorldCat and SPARQL. Hello kitty?