{"id":625,"date":"2015-06-23T22:45:05","date_gmt":"2015-06-23T19:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.helsinki.fi\/kaislani\/?p=625"},"modified":"2019-04-11T13:49:08","modified_gmt":"2019-04-11T13:49:08","slug":"counting-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/counting-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"Counting correspondence, listing letters"},"content":{"rendered":"

A number of years ago, I gave a talk on mapping correspondence \u2013 that is, about the ways in which you can plot letters and epistolary exchanges on a map. Perhaps the most important point arising from that talk, for me anyway, was the understanding that mapping correspondence was by no means a straightforward matter. What exactly do you map, when you map correspondence? The writers’ locations? Or that of both the writers and the recipients? Or the path of delivery the letter? The duration of conveyance? The amount of correspondence?\u00a0And in doing any or all of these, what\u00a0use<\/em> is the map?<\/p>\n

Similar ponderings are behind this blog post \u2013 not about mapping, but about\u00a0counting<\/em> correspondence. What do you count, really, when you count letters? How can counting help? Are graphs useful?<\/p>\n

These thoughts arose from\u00a0reading\u00a0Brenton Dickieson’s blog post,\u00a0“A Statistical Look at C.S. Lewis\u2019 Letter Writing”<\/a>. Working from three published volumes of C.S. Lewis’s collected letters, Dickieson plotted the 3,274 letters on graphs, basically looking at the volume of letters Lewis wrote\u00a0over time, and discussing\u00a0contextual events that are reflected in the sheer numbers of Lewis’s letters. Here’s his graph of the number of letters over time (copied from his blog, with my apologies and thanks):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This graph is much as you’d expect for someone like Lewis, whose fame grew over time, bringing the inevitable mountain of letters with it: it shows overall growth over time.1<\/sup> I’m sure you can immediately see that some of the peaks can be mapped to publications (the Narnia books started coming out in 1950), and other events (WWI in 1914-1918).<\/p>\n

But hang on: what does this graph actually show?\u00a0What<\/em> does it count?<\/p>\n

I think that when we look at a graph like this we tend to make a lot of assumptions. For instance, it is easy to take the above graph as depicting ‘the amount of letters written by Lewis during his lifetime’ \u2013 especially as the number of letters is so high.\u00a0Dickieson actually titles the chart as “the number of letters we have from Lewis each year” \u2013 which you might call ‘the amount of letters which are extant today’. But what the chart in fact shows is a third figure, namely\u00a0‘the amount of letters published in this one edition’. \u00a0These are different things:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. the actual number of letters written by a writer during their lifetime;<\/li>\n
  2. a subset of (1), being the number of letters which survive; and<\/li>\n
  3. a subset of (2), being the number of letters which we (or the editors, rather) know about.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    These are all cases of ‘all<\/em> the letters of X’ \u2013 a common phrase\u00a0in titles of editions is “the complete correspondence”. Of course, attaining a true count of (1) is practically impossible \u2013 do you have copies of all the emails you ever sent? Exactly. So editions of “the complete letters of X” tend to strive to be (2) and say that they are\u00a0(2), while they are of course (3). In fairness, (3) can equal (2), but it is not\u00a0uncommon for further letters to be found after the publication of volumes of “the complete letters”.<\/p>\n

    So if we look back to the graph of Lewis’s letters above, now with the\u00a0understanding that it represents (3) and, possibly, (2), but that it does\u00a0not<\/em> show (1), a second question arises. Given that the graph shows a subset of (1), is this subset representative<\/strong> of the whole? More specifically:<\/p>\n